Page 16 THE VILLADOM TIMES IV • May 19, 2010 Forgotten Holocaust of World War II.” This book describes Japanese atrocities in China as so awful that any attempt at factual correction cannot be taken seriously by closet racists who cannot read Kanji (Chinese) or Katakana (Japanese phonetics). China, a U.S. ally in World War II, suffered such trauma at the hands of the wicked Japanese that nothing the Chinese say can ever be contradicted. Chang, the bipolar daughter of two gifted Chinese academics, somehow became the designated hitter of a book to demonize Japan -- the country that rescued 40,000 Jewish refugees from Hitler’s Germany, including Henry Kissinger. She got away with it. This wouldn’t happen in a nation with a real school system, nor would it have happened in a literary world where most of the reviewers weren’t PC liberal jerks terrified of their own racism. Chang handed the literary and academic world a piece of utter nonsense and they drooled over it because their own covert racism forbade them to disagree with anybody who wasn’t white. Now let’s look at the facts. The Nationalist Chinese government claimed that the Japanese had killed 300,000 Chinese at Nanking in 1937. They claimed this at the Tokyo Trials when the Americans were trying to explain the Tokyo Fire Raid and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki which collectively killed about 300,000 Japanese women and children. American jurisprudence whittled the Chinese figure for deaths at Nanking down to 100,000. The Chinese figure – the ones Chang revitalized in 1997 -- were rightly dismissed as hokum even in the immediate aftermath of World War II. Chang claimed that the Japanese had raped between 20,000 and 80,000 Chinese women at Nanking. She claimed she obtained these figures from the diaries of John Rabe – a hero to the Chinese of Nanking because Rabe did what he could to alleviate their sufferings. Slight problem: Chang didn’t read German, the language that Rabe’s diary was written in. When Rabe’s diary was translated into English, he estimated the Nanking death toll at 50,000 to 60,000, and reported that some of the most horrific incidents had been perpetrated, not by Japanese soldiers, but by Chinese bandits. Rabe, be it noted, took over the responsibility of burying the dead after the battle of Nanking and personally intervened to break up a couple of rape attempts by Japanese soldiers against Chinese women. Rabe, declared by the Chinese to be the real hero of Nanking, estimated the dead of Nanking at 50,000 to 60,000 and the civilian victims of Japanese violence at 450 – including about 100 rape victims. Who is telling the truth here? A German described by the Chinese as a “living Buddha” and “the good man of Nanking” and whose testimony is essentially substantiated by American, British, and Danish witnesses, or an expatriate Chinese-American not yet born at the time who admittedly could not read either German or Japanese and wrote what she was told to write? Nobody is about to believe the Japanese, but their version interfaces surprisingly well with what the American correspondents like F. Tillman Durdin and Alexander Steele saw at the fall of Nanking. The Chinese generals ran out on their soldiers, who hadn’t been paid in five months. Panic broke out when the Japanese broke into the city, and those Chinese who broke and ran were machine-gunned by their fellow Chinese as deserters. The Japanese then executed any Chinese who tried to change into civilian clothes – about 17,000 of them. Those Chinese who surrendered in Chinese uniforms were sometimes fed, given medical attention, handed little white flags, and told to go back home to tell their friends and neighbors their own generals had run out on them and there was no point in resisting Japan. Of course, this Japanese version is an absurd story. They were the “bad guys,” and our World War II propaganda films told us so, just as they told us that Bismarck and Kaiser Wilhelm II wanted to conquer the world. But ask yourself this: If you wanted to conquer China, which option would make more sense: massacre of prisoners and rape of women, or an attempt to show the Chinese peasants how ridiculous their self-appointed rulers were? A sane and lenient policy might convince the Chinese peasants they could get a better deal from Japan – a nation that had previously joined hands with Chinese progressives like Sun Yat Sen to free China from the Manchu oligarchs, and from the West. Chang’s book made a big hit with the Chinese-American population and with U.S. veterans whose finest hour was fighting with the Japanese. Historically, “The Rape of Nanking” is such awful hokum that even Stephen Ambrose wouldn’t have wanted his name on it. The figures for murder victims and for rape victims cannot be justified from any responsible source. The idea that the Japanese wanted to exterminate the Chinese the way the Nazi government wanted to exterminate the Jews and the gypsies is contrary to all logic and reason. Japan’s foreign policy had always been to rally Asians against colonialism, and the Japanese won huge respect for this, especially in India and the Muslim world. Chang finally met her comeuppance when a couple of Japanese newsmen sleuthed into one of her press conferences and showed her, and her audience, that her book was a collection of false reports and fake photographs. She committed suicide. Nanking was the scene of some genuine Japanese outrages, but the numbers are fraudulent and none of them in any way excuse what the Chinese have done to Tibet. Tell them so. If you can’t get to see the Dalai Lama, write him a fan note. Send a copy to the White House. The hottest tickets in New York this spring may be admission to hear the Dalai Lama. When the last block of tickets came up, my wife and son and I put in a bid, and the tickets were all sold before we got into the holding pattern. The next block comes up soon. It’s wise to get those bids in early. This one is not to miss. Why is the Dalai Lama a hot ticket? Perhaps some people want to become Buddhists. Perhaps some people want to see what’s up since Brad Pitt left the Dalai Lama at the end of “Seven Years in Tibet.” The 1997 film was prettied up a bit. The narrator, Heinrich Harrer, is depicted in the film as covertly anti-Nazi but was in fact a voluntary member of the bluntly racist and anti-Communist Nazi SS, which esteemed the sort of Darwinian racism Harrer later repudiated. But the movie also depicts the Chinese conquest of Tibet as crass and brutal, and in this the film is undeniably accurate in spirit, if not in detail. I’ve seen documentary films of the Chinese invading Tibet in 1950 and they didn’t scamper into the country in sneakers. The invasion was spearheaded by T-34 Soviet tanks whose prototype, the BT, was designed in Lyndhurst, constructed in Rahway, and illegally shipped to Russia labeled “tractor” by J. Walter Christie, a hero of New Jersey’s local history, because selling military equipment to the USSR was still illegal before FDR became president. The Chinese government today asserts that the Tibetans are delighted to have the Chinese controlling Tibet and that the widespread movement to demand that China get out of Tibet is stirred up by a few silly people like Richard Gere – not to mention the Japanese, who are mostly Buddhist if they’re anything, and who also wonder why the Chinese are allowed to ride roughshod over Tibetan Buddhism. Most Tibetans don’t want to be part of China, and they don’t want the Chinese interfering with their very serious practice of Buddhism. The Tibetans have every right to resent the fact that their holy city, Lhasa, has been disgraced with a noisy amusement park. The figure of a million Tibetans killed by the Chinese communists may indeed be hyperbolic – a bright young Chinese girl two years out of Beijing, and a friend of friends, once told me that Chinese people always inflate the number of casualties because they understand that whites don’t much care what happens to the Chinese unless the numbers are huge. One may assume that the Tibetans do the same. The negative impact of Chinese communists, inspired by a Marxist anti-Christian blasphemy generated by a dying European civilization on an authentic but antiChristian Asian culture, is a matter of record. The Chinese killed a lot of missionaries (about 200) and Chinese converts (about 20,000) circa 1900 and have also killed a lot of people in Tibet, have drastically suppressed a highly spiritual and totally peaceful religion, and have generally acted like a bunch of 1930s-style Nazi thugs of the type who are so widely -- and rightly -- condemned in the required reading selections in U.S. high schools, yet we continue to grant them Most Favored Nation status. Why? The late Iris Chang wrote “The Rape of Nanking: The Nanking versus Tibet Scouts help to tidy township Boy Scouts from Mahwah Troop 50 recently conducted a community service cleanup on the township’s busy Ridge Road.