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Mix-Ansicht- Opferzahlen in Kriegen werden oft überhöht dargestellt - EM-financial, 28.12.2003, 11:21
- achja die Quelle: - EM-financial, 28.12.2003, 11:22
Opferzahlen in Kriegen werden oft überhöht dargestellt
-->Eine Diskussion, die sich mit der japanischen Besatzung von China im zweiten Weltkrieg befasst zeigt deutlich auf, wie unterschiedlich die Opferzahlen dargestellt werden können. Ohne auch nur einen Hinweis auf andere Geschichten geben zu wollen, stelle ich die entsprechende Stelle einfach einmal ein. Jeder möge sich selbst seine Meinung bilden oder in anderen Fällen nachforschen:
Look, it's clear that the Rape of Nanjing was one of the most barbaric captures of any city in the 20th century. There were weeks of unending atrocities. But it's also pretty clear that the scale of the slaughter was wildly exaggerated by the Chinese after the fact, along with some of the elements of the killing. That's not surprising: victims always exaggerate massacres. That's what the students did after Tiananmen, what the Romanians did after Timisoara, what the Kosovars did after the Serb attacks, etc. etc. Sure there are eyewitness accounts, just as there are eyewitness accounts of American atrocities in the Korean War (e.g. use of biological and chemical weapons) that clearly did not take place. Any eyewitness in Mao's China was obviously going to remember just what he or she was supposed to. We owe it to history not to be taken in by Japanese rightist denials of the massacre or by Chinese exaggerations of it.
The Chinese claims simply don't stand scrutiny. For example, some are based on a Japanese military officer's confession of crimes when he wasn't even there at the time. Now of course a POW is going to confess to anything, but we don't have to believe it. For anybody who wants a closer look at the evidence, my wife and I have a discussion of the incident in our book, Thunder from the East. My sense is that the fatalities are in the range of the contemporary estimates -- say less than 60,000, some of them military -- rather in around today's numbers of 300,000 and up. That's still an atrocity, of course.
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