Yes, I was confused about the figure as I was reading articles written in Japanese.bossel said:It seems, you're confusing some things here. The official PRC victim figure for the Nanjing Massacre is >300,000. Roughly that number is widely accepted in historical circles, but there are a number of lower estimates & very few higher.
30m is, IIRC, the officiall PRC estimate for the whole Sino-Japanese War. This is probably exaggerated. I'd go for a number around 10m, but the estimates vary widely.
The actual number of Nanjing inhabitants at the time is hard to calculate, since the city was full of refugees. It may have been up to 1m, but I never saw the number of 20m anywhere.
bossel said:It seems, you're confusing some things here. The official PRC victim figure for the Nanjing Massacre is >300,000. Roughly that number is widely accepted in historical circles, but there are a number of lower estimates & very few higher.
...
The actual number of Nanjing inhabitants at the time is hard to calculate, since the city was full of refugees. It may have been up to 1m, but I never saw the number of 20m anywhere.
Mainstream historians usually agree on 300,000 as a valid estimate, though numbers between 200,000 & 300,000 (closer to 300,000) are acceptable as well, if you didn't notice. Numbers below 200,000 are only purported by a minority (most of them in Japan).pipokun said:Roughly that number is widely accepted in historical circles
Really? Which circles?
I think that's an important question you ask. I found this keynote address to the International Citizens' Forum on War Crimes and Redress: Seeking Reconciliation and Peace for the 21st Century, Mark Wientraub, Dec. 10 1999, Tokyo:Kionon said:Are we, as a global community, so unwilling to forgive that we must dwell on the actions of those who are mostly dead, and will be completely very soon?
The caracterization 'fabricated' could be considered loaded; perhaps 'misidentified' might serve the purpose better, reserving the term 'fabricated' for genuinely forged instances only. With critical cross-examinations such as offered by Hata Ikuhiko the reliability of existing photos should become more reliable in future studies.ralian said:Also, I would like to point out that in the book written by Iris Chan ﾂ"The Rape of Nankingﾂ", so many fabricated photos were found. Of course, the provider of those photos was Chinese government.
bossel said:The actual number of Nanjing inhabitants at the time is hard to calculate, since the city was full of refugees. It may have been up to 1m, but I did not see the number 20m anywhere.
Maciamo said:But the Spaniards could not have massacred 20 million Amerindian for the sole reason that there were not 20 million Amerindian in the whole Americas when they got there.
Dorian1977 said:I think that Japan was not the only country responsible for killings, during a war casualties are inevitable, even killings of innocent (unfortunately), there are are other countries too which are responsible for world war 2 except Japan, Germany killed millions of people during world war 2 , and Stalins victims are tens of millions therefore blaming only Japan is something inacurate from the historical point of view.
Maciamo said:But the Spaniards could not have massacred 20 million Amerindian for the sole reason that there were not 20 million Amerindian in the whole Americas when they got there. The world population has increased a lot in the last 2 centuries. We are now 6 billion people, but were only 1 billion in 1802 and about 500 million in 1500. Wikipedia tell us that the population of Latin America in 1750 (250 years after the Europeans arrived) was 16 million, including the European settlers.
So what exactly is your point ?Keoland said:Ahem.
Do not underestimate us iberians, my friend. At the time of the spanish conquest in 1532, the Inca Empire had 12 million inhabitants. And the total population of Mesoamerica is estimated at 25 million people.
That's 37 million natives, and it's not even counting the population north of the Aztec Empire, nor those outside the Inca Empire, and much less those that lived in what is now Brazil and Argentina, the latter ones estimated at about 10 million people.
http://www.britannica.com/eb/article?tocId=28051
The population of the Inca Empire at the time of the
Spanish conquest in 1532 is commonly estimated to have been around 12 000 000 (...)
The Enigma of Aztec Sacrifice
(...) Later, however, he and his colleague Woodrow Borah revised his estimate of the total central Mexican population upward to 25 million (...)
So, if the population of Latin America 250 years later was just 16 million people, with millions of european settlers included... you do the math.
lexico said:So what exactly is your point?
lexico said:So what exactly is your point?
lexico said:Do the Iberians have the capacity to rise above the narrow peninsular mentality or the Eurocentric mentality for once?
lexico said:Can you laugh at them in that safty of your home because you lack the imagination ?
If it can be proven with certainty that the pre-Columbian populations of the Amricas was in excess of 20 million, you might have a point, but can it ?Keoland said:My point was that Maciamo was excluding outright the possibility that the spaniards could have killed more than 20 million amerindians, on the grounds that there were not 20 million amerindians to beguin with.
1) What data specifically ?Leoland said:Since the data avaliable points otherwise, I pointed that out - what Spain did in the early XVIth century probably rates as the biggest wiping out of humans ever in terms of the percentage of the total population (I don't recall a bigger one).
Can you be a bit more specific as to how many Portuguese and Spanish were among the 16 million ? Even an informed range of possible population figure ?Keoland said:Actually, the 16 million include millions of european settlers.
Your figure of 50 million is close to one figure of 54 million by geographer William Denevan; this might or might not have been your figure of 50 million, but I'm asking anyway to see if there was a study independent of Denevan's.Keoland said:Also the 37 millions are just the mesoamericans plus the population of the Inca Empire. It does not include the rest of South America. The total amerindian population of central and south america in 1519 was probably around 50 million people, perhaps more.
wiki said:20th century scholarly estimates ranged from a low of 8.4 million to a high of 112.5 million persons...
In 1976, geographer William Denevan used various estimates to derive a "consensus count" of about 54 million people, although some recent estimates are lower than that.
You are probably correct in placing the time of population reduction at around the first century --perhaps even within several decades-- since the arrival of the conquistadors. Nothwithstanding "Dominican friar Bartolom de Las Casas' writings that vividly depict atrocities committed on the natives by the Spanish," the figures (exactly to how great are they ?) hardly accounts for the huge decline in Amerindian population.Keoland said:And the eliminations occurred (in the spanish part) in the very first years of the colonization, not over 250 years - the 16 million people in 1750 already include some recovery by the native population. The data points to the elimination of around 80-90% of the natives in the first 100 years.
wiki said:Scholars now believe that, among the various contributing factors, epidemic disease was the overwhelming cause of the population decline of the American natives.
Disease began to kill immense numbers of indigenous Americans soon after Europeans and Africans began to arrive in the New World, bringing with them the infectious diseases of the Old World. One reason this death toll was overlooked (or downplayed) for so long is that disease, according to the widely held theory, raced ahead of European immigration in many areas, thus often killing off a sizeable portion of the population before European observations (and thus written records) were made.
Many European immigrants who arrived after the epidemics had already killed massive numbers of American natives assumed that the natives had always been few in number. The scope of the epidemics over the years was enormous, killing millions of people — in excess of 90% of the population in the hardest hit areas — and creating "the greatest human catastrophe in history, far exceeding even the disaster of the Black Death of medieval Europe."
As the basic evidence on which you propose your objection to the thread thesis is not sufficiently established, eventhough I find your hypothesis of a major massacre of the Amerindian populations in the hands of the Iberian peoples fascinating and worthy of investigation, it is yet premature to label anything "hypocricy." Perhaps your emotionally devastating observations and personal testimonies from acquaintances regarding Portuguese/Spanish/Belgian atrocities in Africa in recent years have driven you to this hypothesis ?Keoland said:The point is to show the hypocrisy of many which point to the atrocities of the XXth century and show them as "the greatest ever", but at the same time are totally blind to the fact that other peoples (which have a good international standing - there is no international movement against the portuguese or spanish) have done things that make whatever the Japanese or Germans did in WW2 look like small things in comparison. Which happens to be quite relevant to the title of this thread.
Well, if the "us" you are referring to were indeed guilty of 80-90% of Amerindian deaths, don't worry. Just relay the facts and evidence, and I'm sure together we can build a case of genocide to judge the crimes to your satisfaction.Keoland said:It also makes us often wonder why the Germans and Japanese are so often accused, while nobody seems to care about us
McTojo said:So, what's your overall conclusion on this ? I think it's personally disgusting to listen to someone prove an island nation alone was personally responsible for killing the most innocent civilians than any other country in HISTORY ! I think you don't have enough facts to back your claims. When you mention history are you talking about the entire history of man or civilization or recorded history ???? And what makes you think everybody was innocent ? Other people bought up better points !
Maciamo said:I should have said "foreign civilians" instead of "innocent civilians" for 2 reasons :
1) China and Russia may have killed more of their own civilians under Stalin and Mao, than Japan killed around Asia.
2) As you point out "innocent" is a very vague and subjective term. I meant "non-military people who had no weapons to defend themselves" or "people who had never killed anyone". It's true that if you consider that a petty crime ot "moral sin" makes people lose their "legal or moral innocence", then it's difficult to determine.
We may never know about the number of Amerindians who died after the arrival of the Spaniards, but there are two reasons that make me think that Japan's case is worse :
1) Looking at the evolution of the world population, it is improbable that the population of the Americas was higher than 15 or 20 million in the late 15th century. The world population was about 400 million in 1492, and Latin America's share of the world population between 1750 to this day has always stood around 5% (even with modern argicultural technologies, deforestation, etc.). Asia's population in 1937-45 was around 1.3 billion, which makes it more plausible that 15 million Asians may hae died.
2) The vast majority of the Amerindians who died in the first few decades after 1492 (maybe 80% of the continent), died because of diseases, and were not directly or intentionally killed by the Spaniards, contrarily to the mass murders, scientific experiments, etc. of the Japanese in Asia.
You clearly haven't read the thread, even when the link was provided. Please refer to the info linked in Maciamo's post. 1;McTojo said:Again, not enough facts. You pull Wikipedia again, which only gives you world population figures as a whole.
Maciamo said:Looking at the list of World War I casualties and World War II casualties, I noticed that the civilian losses in China during WWII alone were higher than of all other countries combined (except USSR). And the numbers for other Asian countries are not even listed.
How would you know what Maciamo knows if you haven't checked the source he linked? For the sake of accuracy, the figures have to be objectified by taking the source population and number of years of genocide; i.e. deaths per million per year would give you something like this.McTojo said:Furthermore, you wouldn't have any idea who was civilian or non-civilian, given the information and sources you provided, and moreover, how would you even know exact population numbers at that time through your one source. Too many variables to deduce that Japan murdered more civilian foreigners than any other country in history!
It's 2005, and we still can't accurately count the number of human beings on earth, even computers.
.lexico said:which means dishonest revisonist crap made in Japan also crept into his study .