A few days ago, Song Gengyi made extremely wrong remarks in the "News Interview" course, publicly questioning the death toll of the Nanjing Massacre in class, claiming that "there are also estimates of 3,000"; and telling the students that "we should not hate forever, but reflect on how the war came about."
This Song Gengyi, a master's student in journalism at Wuhan University, is a teacher at the Oriental Film Academy of Shanghai Aurora Vocational College, teaching courses such as news interviewing, news writing, news commentary, and new media writing.
After Song Gengyi's erroneous remarks were exposed by netizens, Shanghai Aurora Vocational College responded quickly and quickly made a decision to expel the teacher. Xiao Xin has also been paying attention to everyone's comments on the Internet these days, and some people think that this punishment is too heavy, thinking that the teacher "just said a few wrong words."
This is truly shocking, shocked by those people's ignorance of history, shocked by those people's disregard for national feelings, and shocked by those people's "selfless help" to the Japanese right-wing forces. It should be known that the Japanese right-wing forces have been constantly falsifying and downplaying the relevant facts of the Nanjing Massacre in history textbooks for so many years in order to deny acts of aggression and shirk historical responsibility.
And Song Mou of Shanghai Aurora Vocational College (I just want to call it Song Mou), who openly made such a seriously hurtful and groundless question in class, can be said to have done something on the land of China that the Japanese right-wing forces want to do but cannot do, which is simply a great help to them.
Xiao Xin couldn't help but think of a sentence that a Japanese person said to Mr. Du Xuekui, a Chinese anti-Japanese predecessor: If you forget all this, will we still remember?
Du Xuekui
Yeah, if we all chose to forget, would others still remember? In February 2014, China set up December 13 every year as the National Day of Commemoration for the Victims of the Nanjing Massacre, which is to remember this history, to mourn the victims of the Nanjing Massacre, to mourn all the Chinese compatriots who died by the Japanese invaders during the Japanese imperialist war of aggression against China, to expose the war crimes of the Japanese aggressors, and to make people remember the deep disasters caused by the war of aggression to the people of Chinese and even the people of the world.
For a more detailed look at the death toll of the Nanjing Massacre, the tampering with history textbooks by Japanese right-wing forces, and the purpose of China's national memorial day, see below.
1. Japan committed heinous crimes in the Nanjing Massacre, and 300,000 is the minimum number of deaths
On July 7, 1937, the Japanese invaders created the "Lugou Bridge Incident" and launched an all-out war of aggression against China. On December 13 of the same year, the Japanese invaders captured Nanjing. The commander of the Japanese front, Hatohiko Asakamiya, openly issued such an order: kill all the prisoners.
As early as July 1929, the Convention on the Treatment of Prisoners of War was concluded at the Geneva Conference, which clearly stipulated that any harm to the lives of prisoners of war or acts of violence against prisoners of war by the opposing parties shall be strictly prohibited, and in particular, shall not be murdered or eliminated;
The Geneva Conventions are the minimum international norms to be observed by every modern State and the humanitarian bottom line that every modern person should have. However, after the Japanese army captured Nanjing, it wantonly slaughtered prisoners of war (many of them wounded and sick) and ordinary people, and lost all their conscience without any bottom line, committing the heinous crime of "Nanjing Massacre".
As for the exact number of deaths in the Nanjing Massacre, because of the special wartime situation, a large number of refugees poured in and out, coupled with the cinnamoning and extermination of corpses by the Japanese army, it is difficult to calculate specific data for a while. At the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, the judge asked The American Professor of History, Bedworth, to estimate the death toll, and Professor Beders replied: The question is so big that I don't know where to start...
However, although Professor Bades of Jinling University did not know the approximate death toll, the Japanese invaders themselves knew it. On January 17, 1938, Hiroshi Hirota, then Foreign Minister of Japan, sent a message to his contacts in Washington:
After returning to Shanghai a few days ago, I investigated the atrocities committed by japanese troops in Nanjing and elsewhere. According to convincing evidence, some of the actions committed by the Japanese army in the past and continue to be reminiscent of the heinous actions of attila the Hun king and his men, in which at least 300,000 Chinese civilians were brutally killed, many of them in brutal cases.
Hiroshi Hirota
This news was intercepted by US intelligence personnel and successfully cracked. The data that "at least 300,000 Chinese civilians were brutally killed" came precisely from the mouth of the Japanese people, and was given by the japanese high-ranking officials at that time after a specific investigation.
Of course, not only the Japanese are investigating, we Chinese ourselves are also investigating. After the surrender of the invading Japanese army, Nanjing set up a military tribunal to try important Japanese war criminals in China, the first of which was Gu Shoufu, who owed a lot of blood debts to the people of Nanjing during the Nanjing Massacre. Gu Shoufu, a former lieutenant general of the Japanese Sixth Division, instructed and connived at his subordinate officers and men in Nanjing to throw grenades and strafe at innocent people, and he himself slaughtered with sabers.
During the trial, Gu Shoufu denied the crimes he had committed. The president of the court, Shi Meiyu, asked the skulls of the victims excavated from the Yuhuatai mass grave to be removed, and Gu Shoufu was shocked and finally lowered his head. Later, Shi Meiyu announced the death sentence against Gu Shoufu:
The 6th Division, led by Gu Shoufu as the forward, attacked the Zhonghua Gate on the evening of December 12, 2006, and the vanguard troops climbed the wall with rope ladders and began to massacre. The next morning, Fu led a large army into the city, and together with Nakajima, Ushijima, Suematsu and other troops, they divided into various districts of Beijing City and carried out a large-scale massacre, followed by burning and looting. Counting at the Zhonghua Outer Flower Temple, Pagoda Bridge, Shiguanyin, Shimonoseki Grass Shoe Mountain, etc., the captured soldiers and civilians were collectively shot by the Japanese army with machine guns and burned to destroy the corpses, including Shan Yaoting and more than 190,000 people. In addition, there were sporadic massacres, and more than 150,000 of their bodies were buried by charitable institutions. The total number of victims is more than 300,000. Corpses are strewn all over the place, and the people are deadly... After the fall of our capital, the joint arsonists raged, and hundreds of thousands of people were stabbed. The innocent women and children of the unarmed people are incomparable. It is not only a major stain on human civilization, that is, the sinister of its mental skills, the viciousness of its means, and the fierceness of its harm, but also the indiscretion. Capital punishment should be imposed on a commandment.
Gu Shoufu's death sentence
Gu Shoufu's death sentence was preserved by Shi Meiyu. In December 2004, Shi Meiyu's son, Shi Nanyang, donated the precious manuscript of the Ten Thousand Words Judgment to the Jiangdongmen Memorial Hall. This ironclad fact has shown the world the heinous crimes committed by the Japanese army invading China.
Whether it is the Japanese survey data of that year or the chinese investigation data, the 300,000 deaths are only the most conservative lower limit. In recent years, Sun Zhaowei, a historian at the Jiangsu Academy of Social Sciences, has made more scientific statistics, estimating that the death toll of the Nanjing Massacre exceeded 227,000 according to China's burial records, and that the troops of the Japanese army that invaded China, Ozo Ota Shounan,000 and his neighboring troops disposed of a total of about 150,000 corpses, inferring that the total number of victims of the Nanjing Massacre was as high as 377,000.
Second, in order to cover up war crimes, The Japanese right-wing forces have repeatedly tampered with history textbooks
The "Nanjing Massacre" was a heinous crime committed by the invading Japanese army in China, and it accused the tyrannical cruelty of the invading Japanese army all the time. In order to cover up this inhumane crime, the Japanese right-wing forces have been writing in middle school history textbooks in an attempt to make Japanese teenagers forget this history.
In 1955, Japan launched the "History Textbook Attack", after which it carried out the largest falsification of the contents of history textbooks. At that time, the "Worrying Textbook Problem", which was compiled by the ruling party, criticized the current middle school history textbooks and expressed concern that the Japanese crimes of aggression recorded in the history textbooks would affect the patriotism of the Japanese people.
After that, Japan's right-wing forces intervened in education, occupied the position of "textbook investigator," and directly declared the contents of textbooks that did not conform to "patriotic education" unqualified, and ordered them to be revised and then reviewed. The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology also strictly controls the content of history textbooks, and the content of "war facts" and "war reflection" in secondary school history textbooks is forcibly deleted. The history of the "Nanjing Massacre" has been completely eliminated and replaced by the construction of the "Wang Dao Paradise".
In 1960, the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology explicitly declared that the war initiated by Japan was not allowed to be characterized as a war of aggression in textbooks, and at the same time denied that the war of aggression initiated by Japan had caused misfortune to various countries, and changed it to the "War of Liberation in Asia". From then until the early 1970s, history textbooks reflecting the facts of Japan's aggression were assessed as unqualified.
Since 1979, Japan has again tampered with middle school history textbooks. At that time, the Japanese authorities believed that if Japan wanted to become a "big country," it must first cultivate the people's patriotic consciousness, and cultivating patriotic consciousness requires the help of historical education. Those contents that reflect the history of Japan's aggression are considered unfavorable to cultivating the patriotic consciousness of young people. As a result, the LDP authorities began plotting to falsify history textbooks.
In 1982, Japan's Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology began to review history textbooks again, strictly demanding that the accounts of Japan's wars of aggression be reduced. If it is necessary to write it down, it is necessary to downplay the nature of aggression, such as requiring that "aggression" be changed to "in and out". Almost no textbooks have recorded the Nanjing Massacre. Even if there are sporadic accounts, it is a mistake to change the cause to mean that the Japanese army was provoked by the fierce resistance of the Chinese army, so it launched a decisive attack.
Later, because of the opposition of the people of various countries and the appeals of righteous people in Japan, the japanese history textbooks once restored the account of historical events such as the Nanjing Massacre. In 1997, Japan became the "New History Textbook Compilation Committee" again, once again tampering with history textbooks.
On April 3, 2001, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology of Japan announced that all the revised editions of secondary school history textbooks submitted for examination had been "qualified". One of the most typical is the "New History Textbook" led by the "New History Textbook Compilation Association." This book comprehensively distorts historical facts, denies acts of aggression, openly denies the existence of the Nanjing Massacre, and changes the invasion of China into entry and exit from China.
Since then, especially after Shinzo Abe came to power, Japanese history textbooks have undergone many revisions. For the Nanjing Massacre, they not only changed the death toll from a specific number to "many, many", but also changed "massacre" to neutral words such as "affected".
The reason why the Japanese right-wing forces have repeatedly tampered with history textbooks, especially the history related to the Nanjing Massacre, is to cover up war crimes and deny acts of aggression, in an attempt to make a new generation of Japanese citizens forget about this matter and cultivate a so-called "patriotic consciousness."
Iii. The significance of China's establishment of the "National Day of Commemoration for the Victims of the Nanjing Massacre"
Corresponding to the japanese textbooks that dilute the crime of aggression is the memory of this history by the Chinese people and the tribute to the victims.
In November 1983, Nanjing established the "Nanjing Massacre" history, museum building, monument office. More than a year later, on the occasion of commemorating the 40th anniversary of the victory of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, the "Memorial Hall for compatriots killed in the Nanjing Massacre of the Japanese Army Invading China" was completed and opened to the public. At the same time, a group of experts and scholars began to study the history of the Nanjing Massacre from an academic perspective. They extensively collected archival materials and pictures on the spot, visited survivors of the Nanjing Massacre, and sorted out a series of high-level works on the basis of extensive collection of historical materials.
Every year on December 13, beginning in 1994, the "Memorial Hall of the Compatriots Killed in the Nanjing Massacre of the Japanese Army Invading China" will hold a public ceremony to solemnly mourn the 300,000 compatriots who died, denounce the heinous crimes of the Japanese invaders, and condemn the fallacy of the Japanese right-wing forces in denying the Nanjing Massacre.
However, although this kind of public sacrifice ceremony has a certain impact, because it only stays at the local level, it is not enough at the national and international level. In recent years, due to the growing power of Japan's right-wing forces, they have arrogantly overturned the case for Japanese militarism. For example, in early 2012, Takayuki Kawamura, then mayor of Nagoya, Japan, declared in front of the Nanjing delegation that there was no Nanjing Massacre.
And Shinzo Abe, the grandson of Nobusuke Kishi, a Class-A war criminal at the time, openly visited the Yasukuni Shrine as prime minister and denied Japan's crime of aggression against China!
In this grim situation, deputies to the people's congresses of Jiangsu Province and Nanjing Municipality proposed that December 13 be established as the National Day of Public Worship. In order to mourn the victims of the Nanjing Massacre and all the Chinese compatriots who were killed by the aggressors during the Japanese war of aggression against China, to remember all the revolutionary martyrs and national heroes who threw their heads and spilled their blood during the War of Resistance Against Japan, and to expose the heinous crimes committed by the Japanese aggressors.
On February 27, 2014, December 13 of each year, it was officially established as the National Day of Commemoration for the Victims of the Nanjing Massacre.
The establishment of the National Day of Public Sacrifice reaffirms to the world the consistent position of the Chinese people: history will not change with the changes of the times, and facts will not disappear because of clever denial. The tragic evidence of the Nanjing Massacre is overwhelming, and malicious questioning is absolutely not allowed, let alone tampered with. If anyone wants to deny the fact of the Nanjing Massacre, history will not agree, the souls of the 300,000 innocent victims will not agree, and all the Chinese people will not agree!
epilogue:
Today, we are still fighting against the Japanese right-wing forces that are trying to make the Japanese people forget about the Nanjing Massacre. Song Mou, who once worked at The Aurora Vocational College in Shanghai, blatantly made such a wrong statement in class. It really helped the Japanese and hurt Chinese's heart!
If we forget all this, will they still remember? Remember history, revitalize China!