The way we can show our professionalism and maturity as historians and as people who may have conflicting motives when we investigate such accusations is not to simply offer the reverse: blanket denials and conspiracy theories.”

Well, that statement right there would make you a denier too, since the picture you are painting the deniers is a total strawman. Most of the deniers do not actually deny every single detail and say nothing happened. Many of them dispute the 300,000 figure and thus its status as an unprecedented, huge massacre. Your statement “…Communist regimes have always tried to exaggerate the atrocities committed against their own people, while hiding their own horrible acts. The Nanjing atrocity is no different” puts you solidly in the denier category.

As for the numbers killed being unimportant, well I would say you are wrong. The reason Nanking is stressed is because of the huge numbers of people supposedly killed there. Everyone accepts (even Japanese nationalists) that the conduct of the Japanese army was quite bad at times, which is why the scale of what happened in Nanking is important to both the Chinese and the Japanese that care about the issue.

Finally, as far as I can see GreenPeas just came here seeking knowledge and you rudely dismissed him. I still do not see a reasonable answer to his question, which makes me think you just do not like to be challenged and that you have no answer.

Good day.

There will always be inaccuracies found, the testimony of a soldier or two can be challenged completely, the dangers of relying on the oral histories of people so distant from the event must also be taken into account – and to not find discrepancies, mistakes and distortions would be more suspicious than not finding them, this is important and something historians need to take into account. I am especially ungrateful to Chang, whose problematic (but still important) book made things more difficult with her uses of questionable sources and her many errors.

What you don’t get is a conspiracy theory. Most regimes, but perhaps most skillfully, Communist regimes have always tried to exaggerate the atrocities committed against their own people, while hiding their own horrible acts. The Nanjing atrocity is no different. Sometimes, they have created accusations of atrocities out of little or no evidence – adding lies to a list of inconclusive material. The Korean War is filled with those examples – but also of examples where real atrocities by UN and South Korean forces, worth recording remembering and avoiding in the future also became propaganda bonanzas for the Communists.

The way we can show our professionalism and maturity as historians and as people who may have conflicting motives when we investigate such accusations is not to simply offer the reverse: blanket denials and conspiracy theories. There were horrible atrocities committed in Nanjing. Personally I think they unfortunately overshadows how the violence there was reproduced in towns and villages across China before and after Dec. 1937, and that numbers game is frustratingly distracting and of minimum importance. That doesn’t change the fact that when so much violence and madness happens before a greater number of witnesses, in a more concentrated period of time, and amongst such a large population – you will inevitably get an atrocity that can be more (though never perfectly) documented, remembered, and pointed to as a symbolic representation of how bad things can get when you have undisciplined troops who have been conditioned in such a way that civilian populations are given minimal respect rampaging, looting and slaughtering in a captured city.

John Rabe’s diary is incredibly important alright, but have you ever read the diary(and its critisism) itself? I don’t mean to disrespect you, but wouldn’t it be more important to know how these “important sources” are used?

I doubt my eyes when you wrote a reference to the Tamaki Matsuoka’s book to back up your opinion. When all of “102 former soldiers” uses alias/fictitious names, I would consider its credibility at the bottom low and I would immediately check the background ofmotivation of the author. If you writing a papar on any subjects, wouldn’t you think it’s important to know where these sources (photo, experts, and testimonies)came from so you can research yourself?

Konrad, if you limit “propoganda” to government-issued falsehoods, I supposed you’re right, but the original meaning of the word was really closer to what we mean by “spin.”

http://muninn.net/blog/2004/03/102-former-soldiers-in-nanjing-1937.html