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Paying attention to history is very good advice
By Daryl Glen
I recently received a letter from Iris Chang, the Sunnyvale author who wrote the bestselling book The Rape of Nanking. I had written to her on behalf of a friend who was interested in working on a proposed film version of her book. I found it ironic that I would receive a response from her just as the media were reporting horrors on a daily basis almost as graphic as those she recounted in her book. Iris Chang dedicated her work to the philosopher George Santayana, who wrote, "Those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it." Now more than ever, I thought to myself, we need to remind ourselves of Nanking and events like it.
For those who are unfamiliar with Miss Chang's work, and the events it chronicles, The Rape of Nanking concerns itself with the Japanese invasion of Nanking, China, in early December of 1937, in which fully half of the city's 500,000 residents were slaughtered in a matter of weeks in a manner that violated even the most rudimentary conventions of war. It was My Lai on a grand scale. Babies were bayoneted for sport and the river through town ran red with blood. So horrific were the events that transpired that the Nazis stationed in the city actually appealed to Adolph Hitler to intercede on behalf of the Chinese.
He didn't, although by spring the city had returned to normal. The siege of Nanking has been called "the forgotten Holocaust" because, until Miss Chang wrote her book, few history books even made mention of it. There are many reasons for this, all of which Miss Chang documents in her book.
It is Miss Chang's conceit that when a nation (or a person) does not come to terms with its own dark nature, it cannot move forward--that we cannot learn from our mistakes unless we first admit that we've made them. I remember learning this when I was in therapy in my early 20s and I couldn't help but think of the events in the world today upon reading it again.
We like to think, in this post-industrial high-tech age, that we have moved beyond the barbarism of Nanking or Dachau--and then along comes a Kosovo or a Littleton and there we are, right back in 1937.
We think we have eradicated evil, says Eli Weisel, but evil is resilient, and if we leave the door open a crack, it will come back. Thus the importance of constantly remembering.
These may seem like the best of times in prosperous Los Gatos, but here, too, they could turn into the worst in the twinkling of an eye--or the firing of a gun.
There is a difference today, however. The response to Nanking from the outside, says Iris Chang, gave evidence to a quirk in human nature that allows people remote from such horrors to ignore them altogether. But in this day and age, with our digital cable and cell phones, it is impossible to ignore what is happening in distant realms. Like it or not, we are there, when we turn on CNN or pass a newsstand or receive an email. One of the residents of Littleton even commented on the swiftness of the media's descent on their little town.
She was surprised to see news trucks from as far away as California. "We have become an international event," she said. This same technology, however, has its dark side, as Miss Chang pointed out in a lecture at Herbst Theater last December. We are reaching a crisis, she said, for not only is more efficient genocide now possible, but the extinction of the entire species. It is a sobering thought, and one that is perhaps not addressed enough here in the technological Oz of Silicon Valley, where we can buy better and more innovative software at Fry's--but to what end? It is said that a video game called "Doom" contributed to the carnage in Littleton. Perhaps the young people who still play this and games like it would be better served reading The Rape of Nanking.
Those who do not remember--or understand--the past are doomed to repeat it.
Daryl Glen is a Los Gatos resident.
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Los Gatos, California Since 1881
