Only Lives of Jews are Important

Mr Wyman

Nation Magazine   Letters Editor   Sirs:

I have read where the Wyman Institute has induced you to change your advertisement policy.  This organization specializes in Holocaust studies and proclaims its duty to keep these deaths uppermost in American minds.  Yet there were other slaughters in the world in the past century. These vigilantes at the Wyman Institute berated China for not acknowledging that Japan, not China, was responsible for saving the lives of 18,000 Jews during World War II.[1]

In May of 1995 the People's Daily, the newspaper of the Communist Party of China, welcomed the Prime Minister of Japan when he visited Peking with an editorial accusing the Japanese of responsibility for the deaths of some 35 million Chinese.[2]   For every Jew rescued by the Japanese they managed to kill almost 2000 Chinese.  I posit that the act of charity towards Jews by the Japanese matters very little to the rulers in Peking

The New York Times style book has not allowed the Chinese to claim that many died during the period recalled by them as the Holocaust of the Jews.  Much of the rest of the world recalled the period as World War II.   Their figures of record had only 10 million Chinese dying.[3]  Why quibble over 25 million dead, a number over four times as great as the number of Jews killed by the Germany of Hitler?  To challenge the death of one Jew is to be branded an anti-Semite, by definition unworthy of response.  Deaths of Chinese matter very little.

Claiming uniqueness, much as Harvard President Larry Summers did, for Krystallnacht, the Wyman Institute estimated 100 Jews died on that night in Germany.   Yet one year previous in Nanking, China a much greater massacre occurred.  Chinese figures are over 300,000 Chinese died in 1937, a figure that surpasses the number dead in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

For every Jew who died in Germany on November 10, 1938 some 3000 Chinese died.   In fact more than 3 times as many Chinese died than America had combat deaths in what we consider 45 months of hard fighting in the Pacific.

The United States was much more responsible for the deaths of Chinese than the deaths of Jews.  Mao Tse Tung told Evans Carlson of the United States Marines in May of 1938 that the United States had provided Japan with over half of the war materials she had purchased abroad.  This news stunned Carlson, and he had to reconsider much of the bombastic rhetoric he had uttered in support of American policy.  Mao explained to Carlson that people were sometimes so blinded by the glitter of gold that they do not see their country nor themselves.  Americans, though not Chinese, have chosen to forget this.[4]

When accompanying President Nixon to Peking, James Reston of the New York Times was aghast when he found that Chou En Lai harbored ill feelings towards the Japanese.  Chou replied that China had suffered greatly from the Japanese while in comparison in both World Wars, the United States had suffered very little.  This response caused Reston, the most influential newspaperman of his generation, to examine himself.  His thoughts expounded to Eric Sevareid, onetime heavyweight commentator at CBS, revealed much of American character, historical perspective and primitive insolence.  Mr. Reston was proud Americans had as a defining quality that "we have no memory", and this failure proved we were a forward looking people.[5]

I write as one who believes American ignorance of history is our greatest national failing.  We reject the tempering influence of history, not only our own, but most especially that of other countries.  Most of the world share Chou’s observation that we did not endure hardship remotely approaching other combatants in both world wars and deeply resent our hectoring and niggling.