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The Rape of Nanking (Amazon.com)

The Rape of Nanking (Amazon.co.uk)

The Rape of Nanking (Powell's Books - new or secondhand)

Iris Chang

The Rape of Nanking

The Rape of Nanking (or Nanjing) is the name given to the Japanese invasion of that Chinese city in 1937-38. Fearful that this incident will become a *forgotten holocaust*, Iris Chang set about writing this first ever systematic historical account, which includes some disturbing photographs.

This was a massacre of civilians on a very large scale: 260-350 thousand people in a few weeks. That is more people killed than the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs combined. It is five times as many deaths as the bombing of Dresden. Chang describes the horrors of how this was done: killing contests, live burials, death by fire, death by dogs - and death by outlandish and convoluted methods of murder and torture that exceeded the limits of this reviewer's imagination.

Not only was the Rape of Nanking ordered by the military hierarchy but there was an overall policy to exterminate every man, woman and child in certain regions of China.

The Japanese have whitewashed their past, excluding this holocaust from their schoolbooks - something that would be illegal in Germany. If the knowledge of this corruption in the depths of the human soul is forgotten, then it could very well happen again.

- Barry Kavanagh

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