| THE RAPE OF NANKING THE DAILY RECKONING OUZILLY, FRANCE
MONDAY, 13 DECEMBER 1999
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In Today's Daily Reckoning:
*** More hallucinations on Wall Street *** Linux gains on Microsoft *** "The only Jew in the U.S. Air Force blessed
by the pope."
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*** The "Financial Times": "The gap between
winners and losers in today's bull market is
widening as more money pours into fewer and fewer
stocks." The "FT" has the right idea… but I
don't know why they call it a bull market when
most stocks are going down. *** The week just ended saw a rise of 89 points
in the Dow. But over the week as a whole, the Dow
was flat. And there were twice as many stocks
going down as going up… *** And more than three times as many new lows as
new highs. One out of four stocks on the NYSE hit
a new low last week. This is a bull market? God
forbid we should have a bear market. *** GE keeps going up. Investors believe it is
worth $100 billion more today than it was six
months ago. What did they miss in July? *** The Nasdaq, too, has gone further into Lucy-
in-the- Sky-with-Diamonds territory. Investors
are not merely overpricing stocks… they are
hallucinating. *** Last week they were tripping on Linux stocks.
I wrote about Linux in the summer… suggesting
that it spelled doom not only for Microsoft, but
for 20th Century capitalism, too. The capitalists
have not yet figured it out. *** Linux gives away the software. Yes, you can
make money servicing it… but not enough to give
investors a decent return at these prices. And
most of these companies are going to post losses
from here to eternity anyway.
*** A new online auction company, FreeMarkets,
also caused investors to get spacey. When Friday
began, all it had going for it was a lot of
losses. But by quitting time in NY, it was worth
almost $10 billion… an amount nearly equal to
the capitalization of every public stock in
Russia. Well… it's nearly Christmas. *** Consumer price data come out tomorrow. Don't
pay any attention to it. *** Richard Russell enters the fray concerning
Pope Pius XII in a letter to "Barron's". "If Pius
XII was an anti-Semite, you can't prove it from
my experience," writes "the only Jew in the Air
Force who was blessed by the pope." Russell was a
bombardier in WWII who visited the Vatican, where
soldiers were being blessed. When the others
knelt to receive the blessing, Russell stood
back, explaining that he was Jewish. Pius blessed
him anyway. "I figured I needed all the help I
could get," says Russell. *** We got a foretaste of Y2K out in Ouzilly
Sunday morning. A fierce storm blew down the
power lines. We woke up to a dark house. *** I recalled Gary North's description of the
breakdown of the division of labor following a
Y2K disaster. Of course, we live near a clear,
flowing brook… with chickens, cattle and ducks
roaming around. We even have a couple fat little
guinea pigs which could make a nice meal. Unlike
people trapped in the cities, we could survive
indefinitely. But it would be pretty grim. Fortunately, power was soon restored.
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THE RAPE OF NANKING The storm that knocked out our power also blew
apart many of the decorations for year 2000 in
little Lathus. Even in their prime, they looked
rather feeble. Now they are pathetic. As we drove up to the church at Bourg
Archambault, we found that the wind had also
knocked over the cross in front of the church.
There was the Nazarine, still nailed to the
cross. But the cross was lying on the ground.
Father Marchand took it as a good sign. But
everything is a good sign to him. Every storm
portends fair weather. He is a stopped clock. A perpetual optimist. A
perma-bull on the perfectibility of man and the
triumph of good over evil. But, on this day, 62 years ago, the world was
reminded of what evil was all about. Previous
records in political depravity were broken when
the devil worked overtime for a six-week period.
When it was over, an estimated 377,000 people had
been slaughtered. These people, by the way, were not soldiers of
the Reich nor draftees of the Kremlin. They were
men, women and children of all ages and party
affiliations. Democrats. Catholics. Confucians.
Bricklayers… they shared one common mistake --
they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. These people were not obliterated in an
impersonal air-raid… such as the 60,000 thought
to have been killed at Dresden or the 200,000
killed at Nagasaki and Hiromshima. Nor were they killed methodically and
systematically as the Nazis and Bolsheviks
usually did with their victims. Instead, they were put to death one by one… or
in small groups. They were often tortured…
degraded… and made to suffer as much as the
killers' imagination made possible. Nothing
personal… of course. Butchery. Barbarity. Bestiality. It is hard to
describe what happened in words that do it
justice. When the Roman legions destroyed Carthage, they
took the lives of about 150,000. Timur Lenk
killed 100,000 prisoners at Delhi in 1398. He
built towers of skulls in Syria in 1400. But no cameras recorded the spectacles. The
photos in Iris Chang's book provide evidence
against those who believe in the perfectibility
of man. The event in question occurred more than
100 years after the Rights of Man had been
declared. And nearly two millennia after the
birth of the Prince of Peace. The prohibition
against murder was well-established in all major
religions. Of course, the victims would have
welcomed murder -- it would have been a comfort,
like a stop loss in a bear market. Some of the photos in Iris Chang's book are so
revolting that I wish I had not seen them. Once
seen… they could not be ignored. I could barely
go on with my work. One of the photos in The Big
Black Book of Communism had the same effect… I
could not look at it again… but it was hard not
to recall it. You might be tempted to say of the perpetrators
of these crimes that they were "animals." Such a
comment libels the animal kingdom. No beast of
burden or leisure would do such a thing… I am talking about the "Rape of Nanking,"
revealed to us in gruesome detail by Iris Chang's
book of the same name. The term "Rape" fails to
convey the extent of the misery visited on the
hapless citizens of Nanking, China in 1937.
"Rape" is not a nice thing… but it hardly
describes what the Japanese Imperial Army under
Gen. Iwane Matsui did to the Chinese who fell
into their hands after they took the city of
Nanking in 1937. Though reported in the international press at the
time, it was practically ignored by everyone and
quickly forgotten. It was the Nobody of mass
slaughters. A shame. It might have alerted the world to what
was to come. If Mr. Bewitt were right about being no more than
the sum of his experiences… it is no mystery
why the Japanese behaved as they did. Japan's
dominant caste was military… had been for
centuries. It sought to create a race of superior
soldiers… with complete confidence in
themselves… and total contempt for the rest of
the world. The whole society had been
politicized. Iris Chang recounts the story of one schoolboy
who quivered at dissecting a frog. Struck by his
teacher, he is asked, "Why are you crying about
one lousy frog? When you grow up you'll have to
kill one hundred, two hundred chinks!" The Chinese were deconstructed into "chinks"…
pigs…
animals… subhumans. And enemies of the Imperial
Army. Here's what happened. Just as things couldn't be
better for Wall Street today, they couldn't have
been worse for Nanking in 1937. Or so it seemed.
And just as everyone is long on the future of
NYC, and America, on the eve of this Christmas
season… everyone was short Nanking back then.
Nanking was near a bottom -- its quality of life,
its morale, its capital values, even its
population… were all sinking fast. The Chinese army was overtaken by despair.
Nothing partakes in group-think so much as an
army. That's why morale is so important to a
fighting force. At Nanking, the Chinese army so
oversold itself that it became, literally,
worthless. Soldiers laid down their weapons
without a fight. This confirmed the Japanese
contempt for the Chinese. The prisoners were
taken away… and killed. This left the whole city at the mercy of the
Japanese. "On December 13, 1937, Japanese
soldiers began an orgy of cruelty seldom if ever
matched in world history," says Chang. "…Young
men were mowed down by machine guns, used for
bayonet practice, or soaked with gasoline and
burned alive." …but the soldiers were just getting started. "Not only did live burials, castration, the
carving of organs and the roasting of people
become routine, but more diabolical tortures were
practiced, such as hanging people by the tongues
on iron hooks or burying people to their waists
and watching them get torn apart by German
shepherds… even the Nazis in the city were
horrified…" To his credit, General Matsui was horrified, too.
He had been sick and away from the city. Upon
returning, he was shocked to see how his troops
had been turned into a mob from hell. Curiously, one of the heroes of Nanking was, in
fact, a Nazi. John Rabe was a member of the Nazi
party. But he was also a representative of the
Siemens company and felt a personal
responsibility to protect his Chinese workers.
Once started on this course, his courage and
energy were exemplary. He led an entire community
of missionaries -- many of them American -- and
other foreigners, as well as thousands of Chinese
in the foreigners' compound, through the
experience. Rabe took it personally. He risked his life
daily, confronting the Japanese military
authorities and butting in to save individual
Chinese from Japanese soldiers whenever he could.
Only his Nazi armband protected him… but he
could never be sure how far that would take him. (After the war, Rabe, returned to Germany, was
disgraced as a Nazi… and impoverished. The
citizens of Nanking took up a collection on his
behalf.) Japan is the world's most law-abiding and polite
society. But storms of evil blow up from time to
time. No race or nation is beyond their reach. (I
got a message from a "Daily Reckoning" reader
describing how American soldiers shot Cheyenne
children for sport.) Give the devil his due -- the events described
above occurred during the lifetimes of many
people reading this message. In our century. Our
time. Our world. Many of the killers are still alive, too…
enjoying their comfortable retirements… and
looking forward, no doubt, to the new millennium. Bill Bonner P.S. Elizabeth returned yesterday. Naturally, we
were all glad to see her back. But now we switch
places… I'm on my way back to the United
States. I'll write to you from Baltimore,
tomorrow.
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