Israel-Gaza war is brutal, but China’s history shows human savagery is nothing new
- The killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza is cruel, but it’s not the first time non-combatants have suffered – look at Chinese history
It’s been eight months since the current conflict between Hamas-controlled Gaza and Israel began. More than 35,000 people have died in Gaza, many of whom were women, children and infants.
While Israel has the right to defend itself and its citizens following the border incursions and the kidnapping and killing of Israeli residents by Hamas on October 6 last year, its conduct in the war has been reprehensible.
In its fixation to exterminate Hamas, which many in the world consider a terrorist organisation, Israel has been terrorising Palestinian civilians with its superior weaponry and firepower, the outcomes of which are widespread destruction, deprivation and deaths.
Israel’s military actions, with their cruel disregard for the lives of Palestinian civilians, have gone beyond that of a country “defending itself”. Israel has become a vengeful nation hell-bent on laying waste to the Gaza Strip, and killing tens of thousands of people in the process.
In the long and eventful history of China, there were countless instances of human collateral damage from wars, a few dozens of which involved the deliberate killing of civilians on a large scale.
There were mass shootings and beheadings, people were buried alive, women were raped and then murdered, babies were bayoneted for sport … the savagery perpetrated by Japanese soldiers against Chinese civilians was among the worst in the history of modern warfare.
The consensus of most historians in China, Japan and the rest of the world is that around 200,000 people were murdered in those few weeks.
Today, almost 90 years later, there is still “Nanking massacre denial” in Japan. In school textbooks, it is described in passing, or in coy terms. Some textbooks even omit it altogether.
There are certain groups in Japan who deny Japanese culpability for the massacre, or insist that the death toll was very much lower than the numbers “inflated by the Chinese communists”.
A popular Japanese hotel chain places books containing essays denying the massacre in all of its rooms. I unwittingly stayed there once, but never again.
Nanjing was the scene of another harrowing mass slaughter some 75 years before the Nanking massacre. It was the summer of 1864. Nanjing, the capital of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, had just fallen to the Xiang Army of the Qing dynasty.
The Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864), led by Hong Xiuquan, who claimed he was the younger brother of Jesus Christ, was one of the bloodiest wars in human history.
Although the Qing dynasty eventually emerged victorious from the civil war, it was severely weakened after 14 years of fighting the rebels.
When the Xiang Army, notorious for the greed and brutality of its soldiers, entered Nanjing after two years of laying siege to the city, its commander Zeng Guoquan allowed his men to run amok, looting, killing and raping.
According to the first-hand account of Zeng’s private secretary: “Nine out of ten corpses lining the streets were of elderly persons. Infants, not yet two or three, were stabbed for amusement as they crawled on the roads.
“There were no women under 40 – all were taken captive. The elderly who were injured bore ten or more knife wounds, some dozens. Their cries of pain and anguish were heard in all directions.”
The estimated death toll from the carnage was between 20,000 and 30,000 civilians.
Surely violence, cruelty and bloodlust are hard-wired into our genetic make-up, lying dormant until activated by the right triggers. Why else would we slaughter so many people, over and over again?
