Eyewitnesses aren't saying the same things though. What you're doing is taking two people claiming to have survived the holocaust, one claiming people were starving to death by the thousands and one claiming boys were being killed with masturbation machines and claiming the two are equally valid.
How am I doing that exactly? As I said, all the multiple eyewitness accounts corroborate the rapes and massacres. When all the eyewitnesses are basically saying the same thing, I don't see how you can make that statement in good faith. At this point, you're not even arguing the veracity of any of the extant evidence, you're just saying, "Well some people have been wrong in the past, so we should discard this now", when that makes absolutely no sense.
The battle lasted for two weeks. 10 to 30 thousand Chinese troops died defending Nanking. Trying to claim there wasn't a battle is asinine.
10 to 30 thousand Chinese troops were
massacred after they surrendered. Have you actually forgotten about those Japanese officers that literally had a beheading competition, that we were talking about a page ago? You even went to great lengths to point out the fact that they were POWs and not civilians!! The general timeline of events is not in dispute by actual reputable historians; the Chinese army capitulated almost immediately, and there was no pitched battle...PERIOD. The artillery bombardment lasted two days, the Chinese general ordered a retreat, the army collapses, and the first Japanese forces entered the city on the third day encountering almost no resistance.
The Chinese had almost completely forgotten it until just a couple of decades ago.
Really? Are you going to claim that the Chinese also completely forgot about the comfort women too? Are you Chinese? Do you claim to speak for all Chinese people? Mao Zedong attempting to downplay the incident for political reasons does not equal to "forgetting the incident even happened." Its clearly remained an important part of the historiography of the war. To claim otherwise is asinine. And in any case, no matter what Chinese people may or may not have thought about it a decade or two ago, they clearly think its horrific
now.
I'm comparing the campaign and war because of how it dwarfs the events of Nanking, if you have a civil war from 1927 to 1936 where the communists and anti communists purge 2 million civilians then the 300 000 who died in the fall of the capitol to the invader in 1937 becomes less notable. During the second phase in the civil war from 1945 to 1949 you have several events like the Siege of Changchun the Guangxi Massacre and the Inner Mongolia purge which produced equal civilian casualty counts as the fall of Nanking.
Once again, its apples to oranges. It makes no sense to compare an entire war to one incident. The Attack on Pearl Harbor was relatively minor in terms of loss of life and actual damage to the U.S. Navy, but it had an IMMENSE effect on the psyche of the U.S. far exceeding its actual loss of life and relative damage caused. It wasn't just the population loss that caused the Rape of Nanking to become stuck in the popular memory it was also:
a) The sheer brutality of the Japanese military when it took the city, far and away disproportionate to the situation.
b) The unbelievable scale of the mass rape employed.
c) The fact that all of this happened over the course of a few weeks.
d) The harrowing accounts of those who were there, including the lead diplomat of Japan's closest ally, and the testimony of survivors and Japanese soldiers who participated.
e) The fact that this was relatively early in the Sino-Japanese War, before both sides had become entrenched, and the Japanese had turned the war into a genocidal conflict with their "burn all, loot all, destroy all" policy, causing it stand out as that level of brutality hadn't become routine during the war yet.
f) The vehement and constant denial that the event even took place by the Japanese right wing, similar to Holocaust Denial.
Its not that anyone has actually forgotten Japan's other atrocities. But this one stands out as an exemplar of their moral bankruptcy.
You're trying to remove historical context to appeal to emotion. I'm not going to lower my skepticism based on pathos.
The only person who has ignored historical context is you. You've completely ignored how the incident utterly horrified the world at large once it became known, and how that effected how people would view the Japanese and their government for the rest of the war. You've done a lot to try to downplay this and pretend like nobody cares about the incident despite abundant evidence to the contrary. I just have to ask: are you Japanese by chance? You are fighting this way too strongly (yet poorly) to be some neutral third party figure with no connection to a country that was involved in the incident.
