Reflections on Nanjing: Escaping the shadow

It's with a somber heart that I find myself today contemplating the 80th anniversary of the infamous rape and slaughter of hundreds of thousands of innocent Chinese in Nanjing by invading Japanese troops in the winter of 1937-38.

That collective atrocity - made up of thousands of individual atrocities committed over several weeks - shows at a breathtaking scale the nature of the beast at the heart of the human race and the danger of unchaining it. The Nanjing Massacre is among the ugliest incidents in world history, though far from unique in its depravity.

I never served in uniform (an unfortunate gap in my life's experience), nor in combat. Yet my years of reading military history have taught me something of the horrors of war, the greed of nations, of man's inhumanity to man, the fragility of peace and the value of life. And the cycle continues.