Memorial day prevents past being whitewashed

People pay silent tribute to the Nanjing Massacre victims at Zhongshan Wharf in Nanjing, capital of East China's Jiangsu province, Dec 13, 2021. [Photo by Su Yang/China Daily] 

This is an editorial from China Daily.

Monday marked the eighth National Memorial Day for Nanjing Massacre Victims. Exactly 84 years ago, imperial Japanese forces occupied Nanjing, then capital of China, and massacred over 300,000 innocent Chinese civilians and unarmed captives within six weeks.

Now, 84 years later, the 1.4 billion Chinese people remember the victims together, not to perpetuate hatred, but to cherish peace. It is the common wish of the 1.4 billion people that peace should be treasured and preserved, and that war should never come again to the nation, which suffered so much from invasions and wars in its recent history.

Compared with 1937 when China was weak, disintegrated, and in chaos, the country now is much more capable of resisting aggression and maintaining peace and stability. China is now the second-largest economy in the world, one of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, and has military capabilities that any foreign power must take into full consideration before making any aggressive moves against the country.

As Vice-Premier Sun Chunlan stressed at the memorial ceremony held on Monday, "The great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation has entered an irreversible historical process." Gone are the days when a foreign power could send a few gunboats and bombers and occupy the Chinese capital. China is now fully able to defend its territories and protect its people.

It should be noted that the Nanjing Massacre is a scar on the history of not only China, but also the whole world. The fascists massacred people everywhere they went. The total number of casualties in China during that period is 100 times the 300,000 in Nanjing, while that of the world is twice that total.

Eighty-four years have passed and there are only 61 witnesses to the Nanjing Massacre still alive, with an average age of 91. This year alone, 11 more witnesses passed away.

The Japanese government has never issued any formal apology for the massacre. Instead, it has more than once allowed publishing houses to delete "Nanjing Massacre" from their middle school textbooks, its prime ministers have visited the Yasukuni Shrine where Japanese Class-A war criminals convicted of being accountable for the massacre are honored, while its "historians" repeatedly rewrite history to try and deny the atrocity ever happened.

But neither the elapsing of time nor the passing-away of witnesses will dim the Chinese nation's remembrance of what really happened. The inhuman deeds of Japan's imperial forces have already been recorded as one of the darkest pages in human history, and that stain on the country's image is indelible.

The right-wing politicians in Japan today should stop dreaming about glorifying their military past. Instead, they should heed the lessons of history.