Armenian Genocide and the Rape of Nanking free essay sample

I believe that one of the best ways to do this is to educate people about these terrible crimes and make sure that we do not forget the things that happened, and all of the people that unnecessarily lost their lives. The Rape of Nanking was a horrible event that took place in 1937 when the Japanese occupied the Chinese province of Manchuria. The Japanese first invaded this province in 1931 and it wasn’t for six more years until they took their next step in their plan of conquest. In early July 1937 the Japanese and Chinese troops clashed in Peking in an incident at the Marco Polo Bridge. The Japanese troops used this to justify launching a full blown attack on the city at the end of the month utilizing massed infantry, tanks and airstrike. With all of this it did not take ling at all for the city and the surrounding area to fall to the Japanese. The first concern of the Japanese soldiers was to eliminate any threat from the 90,000 Chinese soldiers. Although the Japanese were greatly outnumbered with their 50,000 troops they were able to defeat the Chinese with their great amount of infantry and the fact that the Chinese troops were so loosely organized. The Japanese were instructed to inflict as much possible pain on the Chinese soldiers as possible to toughen them up for future battles and get rid of any civilized notions of mercy. There is film footage and photographs taken by the Japanese documenting smiling soldiers conduction bayonet practice on live prisoners, decapitating them with severed heads as souvenirs. Some of the remaining Chinese POW’s were mowed down by machine gun fire, and others were tied-up, soaked with gasoline and burned alive. After the Japanese had completed the destruction of the Chinese soldiers, they turned their attention to the woman of Nanking. Old women over the age of 70 as well as little girls even younger than the age of 8 were dragged off to be sexually abused. As many as 20,000 females, with some estimates as high as 80,000 were gang raped by the Japanese soldiers. They were then stabbed to death with bayonets or shot so that they were unable to bear witness to these terrible crimes. These terrible acts of of citywide burnings, stabbings, drowning, strangulation, rapes, theft, and mass murder continued on for the next 6 weeks. No man, woman, or child was safe at this time and could be shot on a whim at any time. The streets of Nanking were said to have literally run red with blood. After this period of extreme violence the Japanese slightly eased off and settled in for the duration of the war. To pacify the population during the long occupation highly addictive narcotics including opium and heroin were distributed to the people regardless of the age. An estimated 50,000 persons because notorious Comfort Women system was introduced which forced young Chinese women slave –prostitutes, existing solely for the sexual pleasure of the Japanese soldiers. In the course of just six weeks the Japanese soldiers brutally murdered 300,000 out of the 600,000 in the population. This was a horrible event in our world’s history and it is very important that we remember what happened so that it does not happen again. The Armenian genocide was the first genocide to take place in the 20th century. The Armenians were attacked in their homelands of Turkey, by the Turkish people. The Armenians had been targeted in this area for a very long time and had been persecuted by the other religions in this area for many years leading up to this genocide. The genocide began when the forty thousand men serving in the Turkish army had their weapons confiscated and they were put into slave labor battalions building roads, being used as human pack animals. With these brutal work conditions they suffered a very high death rate and those that did survive would soon be shot outright. Next 300 Armenian political leaders, educators, clergy men, and dignitaries were taken from their homes and were briefly jailed and tortured then hung or shot. Then came mass arrests of Armenian men in the country by Turkish soldiers, police and volunteers. The men were tied together in small groups and then taken to the outskirts of town and were shot or bayoneted by death squads. Local Turks often joined in the killing armed with knives and sticks. Next it was the turn of the Armenian women, children, and elderly. On very short notice they were taken from their homes with the understanding that they were being taken to a non-military zone for their own safety. What they were really being taken on however were death marches. Turkish gendarmes escorted individual caravans consisting of thousands of deported Armenians. These guards allowed criminals known as the â€Å"Special Organization† to attack the defenseless people killing anyone that they pleased. They were encouraged to raid the caravans and steal anything they wanted. A very large amount of sexual abuse and rape of girls and young women occurred at the hands of the Special Organization. Most of the attractive young females were kidnapped for a life of involuntary servitude. An estimated 75 percent of the Armenians on these marches died, especially children and the elderly. Those who did survive were thrown off cliffs, burned alive, or drowned in rivers. During this genocide the Turkish countryside became extremely littered with corpses. Leaders advised that the corpses be buried and gotten rid of, but this advice was generally ignored. This left foreigners including German government liaisons, American missionaries, and U. S. diplomats in the country to be chocked and appalled at what was left out for anyone to see. Two million Armenians lost their ability to live in their historic homeland of Turkey from the time of 1915-1918 through forced deportations and massacres. These two genocides both had many similarities. They were both acts of hate against a group of people that had been building for many years leading up to the genocides. They both experienced extreme hate without any reason or viable justification on either the end of the Turkish or the Japanese. Some differences are that the Rape of Nanking took place over a shorter period of time, and with less people in the original population, although it was just as brutal, if not more so than the Armenian genocide. These horrible acts need to be remembered and people need to be educated about the horrible things that have taken place. I believe that it is the only way we can prevent something like this from happening, and it is important that we are aware of what is happening so that there are not any more lives unnecessarily lost. There have been far more t genocides in our worlds history than there ever should have been. We can only take comfort in the fact that hopefully humanity will learn from its mistakes and not allow anything like this to happen again.