Japan's Dangerous Revisionism
there are nationalist japanese who would like to rewrite history, trying to gloss over japanese crimes against the far east during its expansionist, fascist phase in the early 1900's through WW2. Now this. its unbelievable that anyone would try to minimize the Rape of Nanking (aka nanjing)...given the fact that I believe there are living survivors of this fiasco....and the insurmountable amount of evidence disproving this stupid claim.

This is one of the key reasons that holocaust denial should not be outlawed: these people who deny a crime against humanity, or attempt to rewrite history should be confronted, disproved, discredited and destroyed. legally.

The best thing about this is that it sheds light on this incident which has a low profile in the west.

One note: msnbc does not use scare quotes around the words "so-called" in the lead paragraph:

TOKYO, July 13 — A senior member of Japan's conservative ruling party drew fire Sunday after he said estimates by some historians that Japanese troops killed 300,000 people in the so-called Rape of Nanking were ''a big lie.''

how is this "so called"? its not "so called", it is. that is not a debate. why are they complicit in this crap?

And this isn't to villify japan in general, as i believe most japanese realize and can face japan's sometimes shady past:

The Nanjing Massacre was ''an atrocity committed by Japanese militarism during the war of aggression in China,'' a fact backed up by ''ironclad evidence,'' said ministry spokesman Kong Quan in a statement on its Internet site.