Chuangfeng Chen
English 1A
The relationship between Nanking Massacre and Holocaust
There is an extremist negative philosophical concept that human beings are born
naturally evil in legalism. Since human beings are primordially evil, people are possessed with
vicious beliefs to diminish other races in order to dominate the world’s super power. Thousands
of cruel realistic examples of human’s evilness have been recorded throughout human history.
Mostly recently, in the twentieth century, the Holocaust is known for its large systematic
conspiracy against six million Jews who were killed in various brutal ways under the regime of
Nazi’s dictatorship. Generally, this inhuman event is often discussed with its cruelty and
statistic of deaths, but people are less aware of the importance of the causes. The causes and the
motivations of such an event are quite common to a less well known war crime that happened
in China, the Nanking Massacre. Both of these events have happened during World War II, and
they were caused by xenophobia and dehumanization.
On December 1937, the imperial Japanese troops invaded the city of Nanking.
During the next six weeks, they killed and tortured numerous Chinese civilians. Over three
hundred thousand people were killed and more than twenty thousand women were brutally
raped, which resulted in the event known as “The Rape of Nanking” or “The Forgotten
Holocaust”. Chinese at Nanking were being buried alive by the sinister Japanese troops who
were competing with each other to invent new horrible ways to kill Chinese whom they
regarded as subhuman. Both Nanking massacre and the Holocaust were motivated by racism
and those who committed the war crimes saw them by considering their victims as inferior
races to themselves. Actually, the seeds of racial dehumanization and xenophobia of these two
atrocities were planted decades ago before the events had truly taken place. Throughout history,
Japan is considered as a small island compare to China’s vast landscape. The intolerance of
Chinese owning a huge resourceful land had triggered the arrogant Japanese jealousy.
Eventually, the accumulated xenophobic jealousy had transformed into hatred because most
Japanese had considered themselves a superior race than Chinese, and there was no reason for
an “inferior race” to keep such a huge land. Therefore; during the nineteenth century, China’s
most depressive period, Japan had revealed its evil ambitious to invade China. Similarly, The
Holocaust was “ritualized” before it actually happened. Before the Holocaust, Adolf Hitler
claimed that the Germans were superior to any other races, especially Jewish people; he even
compared Jewish people as maggots in a rotten body. Jewish people were dehumanized through
demonization, propagandas and political enforcements. Consequently, all these pre-planted
seeds broke out the most tragic event in the human history.
Japanese children born in the earlier nineteenth century were raised to hate China.
They were brainwashed and psychologically forced to view Chinese as enemy. The children
were trained in an unconscious xenophobic way to kill Chinese prisoners emotionlessly. This
was beyond their control; it was the duty of every Japanese citizen to obey the emperor, who
was declared the son of heaven. Since the Japanese Emperor was a God, who only ruled Japan
would mean that his power was limited only to Japan, which wouldn't make him a God at all.
Chances had come to build the Japanese emperor’s legacy. During World War II, he decided to
view China as the main outlet for his imperial and expansionist ambitions; therefore, he created
different excuses to invade China. In order to take over such a huge country, Japan had to use
some serious methods to psychologically as well as militarily destroy its enemy.
In the nineteenth century, the rise of Nazi nationalism, this broke out the hatred of
the Jewish people. Hitler and his Nazi regime led a campaign of propaganda spreading lies
about the Jewish people. He created a negative image of the Jews, blaming them for the
economic and social problems of Germany and the world. Jewish bankers were seen as evil and
exploiting capitalists. The propaganda was aimed to demonize the Jews and to create a
xenophobic effect to urge Europeans to hate Jewish people in order to lay the foundation for the
elimination of the rights and freedoms of the Jews. With the growth of modern nationalism, a
German author and philosopher Paul de Lagarde wrote, "I have long been convinced that Jews
constitutes the cancer in all of our life; as Jews, they are strangers in any European state and as
such they are northing but spreaders of decay." The Nazis preached that Jews must be excluded
from society, and used schools, the media and popular art forms such as films, posters and
dramas to teach a distorted image of the Jews.
Inspired by the western ethnic nationalism combined with social Darwinism, It is
the struggle for survival of the fittest nations and races. As the superior race in Asia, so the
Japanese thought of themselves, it was their duty to whip out the weaker races, especially
Chinese, with a crack of the Japanese imperial whip. Since Japanese were so arrogant to
believe they were the “superior race”, they started to spread racial terminologies, calling
Chinese, “Shina”, which means the unclear Chinese. And, they started dehumanize Chinese as
pig and “sick man of Asia”. The racial discrimination against Chinese was intended to
dehumanize the Chinese people and to create a false illusion for the Japanese imperial army to
kill Chinese without any remorse. The Japanese enslaved Chinese by forcing Chinese children
to receive slavery education.
For years before Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany, he was obsessed
with ideas about race. In his speeches and writings, Hitler spread his beliefs in racial "purity"
and in the superiority of the "Germanic race" which he called an Aryan. He claimed that his
race must remain pure in order to one day take over the world. And, he also believed that
Jewish people were the “inferior race” that tries to destroy the Aryan racial purity. When Hitler
and the Nazis came to power, these beliefs became the government ideology and were spread in
publicly displayed posters, on the radio, in movies, in classrooms, and in newspapers. The
propaganda was intended to dehumanize the Jews by naming them an “inferior race.” Moreover,
some German scholars published articles to dehumanize. Hitler: “Was there any form of filth or
crime...without at least one Jew involved in it. If you cut even cautiously into such a sore, you
find like a maggot in a rotting body, often dazzled by the sudden light - a Jew.”