290 Self and the Phenomenon of Life
b2726 Self and the Phenomenon of Life: A Biologist Examines Life from Molecules to Humanity “9x6”finished up with multiple bayonet stabbings, or were given to the dogs
to be bitten and torn and eaten. Some were disemboweled or dismem-
bered alive. Some were nailed to boards and run over with tanks. Some
had their eyes gouged out and their noses and ears hacked off before
being set on fire. One soldier, who participated in the mayhem but later
repented, confessed sixty years after the event: “Few know that soldiers
impaled babies on bayonets and tossed them still alive into pots of boil-
ing water. They gang-raped women from the ages of twelve to eighty and
then killed them when they could no longer satisfy their sexual demand.
I beheaded people, starved them to death, burned them, and buried
them alive, over two hundred in all. It is terrible that I turned into an
animal and did these things.” But how could a person turn into a beast?
Another former soldier wrote, “Good sons, good daddies, good elder
brothers at home were brought to the front to kill.” Reluctant new con-
scripts were desensitized to cruelty and conditioned to kill by supervised
practice on live victims with swords and bayonets, frequently in the form
of contests, until atrocity became routine and banal, and human suf-
fering, an amusement and recreation. By one account, about 300,000
Chinese civilians were slaughtered, a figure that matches the death toll
from the atomic blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. Among
these, 20,000 were rape victims, who frequently were tortured to death
or were killed following the sexual assault in order to eliminate evidence
of the crime.50,51
What was the cause of these heinous acts? It appears that the tactic
of torture and massacre was used deliberately to intimidate China to
surrender. And behind all these acts was Japan’s ambition of territorial
expansion into the vast land of China, a greed for resources.
12.13.5 Bataan Death March
Albert Brown, the last surviver of the infamous Bataan Death March
during World War II, died in 2011 at the age of 105. Brown, an Ameri-
can soldier, was sent to the Philippines in 1937 as an army captain. When