The Illuminations

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China

Beyond Genocide #5, completed 200X.

The history of human civilization in China is one of the oldest and most complex histories on earth. The atrocities of the 20th century, by far, outnumber in deaths every other mass atrocity recorded. At the end of the era of dynastic rule in 1911, competing forces of warlords, rebel gangs, nationalists and communists bloodied the Chinese landscape with over 12 million deaths. The Japanese invasion into China in1937 was a uniquely barbaric episode in the annals of mass atrocity. Rape and murder of Chinese women and brutal torture and execution of Chinese civilians still live in the memory of witnesses. The domination of Mao Tze Tung and the Communist Party sacrificed millions of defiant citizens to the will of “The Party.” The social engineering policy of the “Great Leap Forward” destroyed the agricultural system in China and instigated the world’s greatest famine.

This complex illumination draws upon the words of Confucius as its central theme. The poetry inscribed, written in ancient history, is an appropriate reminder of our obligation not to force upon others that which we would not wish upon ourselves. The atrocities illuminated bear testimony to our willful disregard of the lesson of Confucius. A mixture of reverence for the bewilderingly numerous wonders of the Chinese nation and the indignity of the bloodshed perpetrated within, creates a startlingly penetrating illumination worthy of the enormity of the history of Chinese civilization and its atrocities of the 20th century.