All of this reminds me a trivial question a certain X-gener (one who was born after 1980 in China) asked me about translation. In news reports, he said, he had seen the horrible events 70 years ago being variously described as Nanjing Massacre, the Holocaust of Asia or Nanjing Incident. He hence asked whether he could translate 南京大屠杀into Nanjing Incident instead of Nanjing Massacre. He was asking if, in effect, he would sound "more objective, impartial" with the word "incident".
My reply to him then I forgot. My answer now is NO, unless you are someone who has no conscience and no sense of proportion whatsoever.
An incident is any event that is unusual. Man A robs Woman B and runs away with her purse and an I-Pod without causing her bodily harm. Policemen C captures Man A and has the purse and I-Pod returned to Woman B, who happily goes with the two men to the police station to record the incident. Each gives their own account of what happened. That's an incident. That's being objective by calling it an incident. But to call the Nanking Massacre a mere incident? That's way too X-generation (young and ignorant) to be sensible, too cool to be comfortable.
After all, we're talking about civilians being buried or burned alive by the tens and by the hundreds at a time, daily and for three months on end. We're talking about people being tied onto posts and knifed to deaths by Japanese soldiers for practice. We're talking about women being raped to deaths, about pregnant mothers being raped and having their bellies sliced open, one of them having her unborn baby poked out of the womb and raised up in the air on the tip of a bayonet (these are just a few of the graphic images presented by the Nightmare in Nanking).
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