> Yeah...the Nanking Massacre was a picnic, right? <
And the person who saved at least 200,000 Chinese people from the slaughter was - get ready for this - a Nazi by the name of John Rabe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Rabe
Thank you for sharing that. What an incredible illustration of how blurry the lines can become in human moral agency... the idea of a straight up German Nazi doing a humanitarian act like this is certainly enough to make a few heads explode.
There was a Japanese counterpart — a diplomat in Latvia or some other podunk eastern european country that issued travel visas to over 6,000 Jews, allowing them to leave that nation and go to Japan.
One wonders how that Japanese diplomat would have behaved in Nanking or how Mr. Rabe would have acted had the civilians in Nanking been Jewish...
I had a philosophy professor tell me once that “All ethics are situational.” The older I get, the more I recognize the wisdom in that statement.
Free Republic never ceases to amaze me...I learn new things all the time. Thank you for posting this...never knew.