I just finished reading Iris Chang’s history of the Japanese occupation and sheer wanton destruction of the Chinese city of Nanking in 1937-38.  Chang’s story is somewhat of a personal one.  Although she had no first hand experience of these terrible events, her parents were refugees of the war who eventually made their way to America.  Her desire to right a historical wrong is apparent throughout the book, but the endeavor took an unexpected turn.

She writes in the epilogue:

This book started out as an attempt to rescue [victims of the Rape of Nanking] from more degradation by Japanese revisionists and to provide my own epitaph for the hundreds upon thousands of unmarked graves in Nanking.  It ended as a personal exploration into the shadow side of human nature.

Chang’s account of the massacre that saw the deaths of no less than 260,000 Chinese men, women, and children (most of whom were non-combatants) is definitely one to cause readers to reflect upon the “shadow side of human nature.”  She spares none of the gruesome details of this tragic event that has left such an indelible mark upon the Chinese memory and haunts Sino-Japanese relations to this day.  Of particular interest to me, however, were her conclusions regarding the horror.  Having journeyed into a world where there seemed to be a total suspension of morality, where men were used for bayonet practice and women for the gratification of soldiers, how would she explain how all of this could happen in the first place?

Some of you may detect a thread that has run through both my lectures and writing as of late: the problem of evil.  I suppose my recent engagements with critics of the Christian faith have caused me to reflect deeply upon how they answer this question.  Whether it is a student on a college campus debating me on God’s existence or an agnostic theologian (yes, I am aware that this is oxymoronic) like Bart Ehrman discussing the problem of suffering, I find that their answers are equally unsatisfactory.  Only a fool would deny the existence of evil.  But that is precisely where the “there is no God” logic necessarily takes you.  After all, if there is no God, there is no right or wrong.  There is only what happens, and that is an altogether different thing.

That brings us back to Iris Chang.  (Whose religious beliefs are, by the way, unknown to me.)  In choosing a subject like this Asian holocaust, delving into perplexing philosophical issues like the nature of good and evil was inevitable.  One does not write a book on what happened at Nanking or Auschwitz while offering no judgments or condemnations.  That would be immoral.  No, it is the task of the historian to explain to us not only what happened, by why it happened.  And it is on this point that Ms. Chang loses her footing.

After so painstakingly documenting the horrors, stirring our emotions of shock, sympathy, and anger, Ms. Chang clearly feels that she is on less certain ground when it comes to the moral component that under girds the whole story of what happened in Nanking during those dark months of 1937-38.   This is what makes the book a disappointment.  A topic like this one offers a historian a wonderful opportunity to enlighten readers on human nature: Why did some people risk their lives to save others (as she notes many Christian missionaries and others did)?  Why did some Chinese collaborate with the Japanese?  What were the conditions that enabled thousands of ordinary Japanese youths to rape, decapitate, and torture people for the sheer sport of it?  And what is it in the human make-up that left so many with deep emotional scars?  In the end, Ms. Chang loses her nerve and goes for the stock responses to these questions: it was all the result of an emperor-worshiping culture dominated by a military dictatorship.  “The less restraint on power within a government,” she writes, “the more likely that government will act on the whims or psychologically generated darker impulses of its leaders …”  The solution, she concludes, is more accountability.

But it is here that she hints at the inadequacy of her own answer.  Why do men and their governments need accountability at all?  Why does “power corrupt and absolute power corrupt absolutely”?  She is right in asserting that this formula is true, but she fails to follow this thought upstream to its source.  Consequently, the moral lessons readers might have learned from this nightmarish incident are superficial ones amounting to little more than "be careful how you vote" and "watch out for the military."

So, if you’re looking for a narrative account on a little known but important part of twentieth century history, The Rape of Nanking is a worthy read.  If you are looking to understand the moral implications of it, however, I suggest Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.

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