Posts Tagged ‘history’
71st Anniversary of Nanking Massacre
As some said, historical atrocities like the Nanking Massacre are forgiveable, but not forgettable. We remember our tragic past not just because of the hundreds of thousands of innocent lives lost, we also remember how the such basic humanity was lost in this atrocity. It serves as a constant reminder that such a tragedy should never happen again to any member of the mankind - I also believe that if the outside world really cared of what was happening Nanking, the outcome would be totally different.
But as the author of the book "The rape of Nanking" Iris Chang notes, she fears that: "this reversion in human social evolution, would be reduced to a footnote of history, treated like a harmless glitch in a computer program that might or might not again cause a problem, unless someone forced the world to remember it." The facts of this massacre are still largely unnoticed in rest of the world.
Remembering a historical atrocity is to remember the full picture of it, not just the hate involved. There were also people who cared, who did something to try to stop the tragedy, and we are forever graceful for them. John Rabe, despite of his Nazi Party member stuatus, saved at least 100,000 Chinese lives in Nanking Safety Zone. John Magee, an American missionary who risked his life to secretly film the masscre in Nanking, just wannted the world to know that should do something.
Lest we forget.
back in time
As part of Google’s celebration of its 10th birthday, Google has made its earliest search engine index from January 2001 available to the public. With the help of the Internet Archive, people can revisit those pages even if they are not there anymore.
Sure I believe most of my visitors like you know the Internet Archive bit already – it has archive pages right back to 1996. But I still enjoyed this 2001 search. You need to know the exact URL of the page you wanted before you can access it in Internet Archive, but this Google search does not, just type in the key words you wanted.
This enables you to do a lot of stuffs ... like check what kind of promises auntie Helen has made back then, or things happening in Afghanistan before the 911. Quite interesting to see how the world was like - blog was pretty much a new concept, SNS has yet been created, and people's hope was still high on Duke Nukem Forever.
Apart from those, it's just fun to revive your good memories.
