Nanking Massacre Photographic Proof | Hacker News Reader

Nanking Massacre Photographic Proof

tiktok.com

17 pointsWildgoose11 comments

This was viral on TikTok a few weeks ago. It was determined to be fake and probably a stunt to get followers and attention.

According to NBC: "Kail told NBC News that the photos turned out to be from Shanghai, not Nanjing. He said he couldn’t elaborate further on the advice of his lawyer." (https://www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture/viral/pawnshop-owner-nan...)

Oh God I don't want to click that. I've seen one photo on wikipedia of a woman with a sword in her vagina and I did not need that.

EDIT: Although I do not want to see it, perhaps I should and I regret this has been flagged. The Japanese were never held responsible for this, certainly not at the level of the Holocaust perpetrators, and perhaps that's because there's not enough exposure. When you see photos, like the dead bodies in the gas chambers, it offends your humanity at a level that begs a response.

I don't really want to click on this link, but have read some horrific descriptions of the event.

Anyone care to share what the link contains and why its on the front page of HN?

A guy found an album of photographs that includes unprecedented photos of Nanking's massacre. But they don't show them...

Some pawnshop owner found a book documenting Nanking but it doesn't show any disturbing images .

It doesn't show anything graphic. It's a guy explaining that he discovered an old photo album depicting the Nanking atrocities.

Click the link. He doesn't show the actual pictures, just talks about the photo book that a customer brought in to get appraised, and his shock when he found pictures of the rape of Nanking in it.

This blew up on TikTok several weeks ago, and I haven't yet seen any new updates since.

edit; Why the hell was this post flagged? There's nothing graphic in the link.

They don't show anything in the TikTok. It's a photo album from a soldier that apparently has pictures of the rape of Nanking, he stops before he gets to the explicit photos.

He specifically skips over showing any actual photos taken. His claim is it's ~30 photos of the Rape of Nanking, previously unseen. The video is a plea to get them to a museum to be preserved, because most evidence was destroyed.

as I mentioned in another reply, this album has been completely debunked -- it's not "fake fake". But it's just not at all a collection of actual WW2 Nanjing photos, and it's still not clear to me why the TikToker assumed that (if we imagine him acting in good faith).

But if this pawn shop owner in Minneapolis had serendipitously found an album of actual never-before-seen documentary photos of a famous, horrific but relatively unknown war crime -- then crowdsourced attention/support via Tiktok to get those photos to where they could be verified and authoritatively disseminated? That would definitely (imho) be HN front page material -- just a classic Internet power-of-the-masses type story.

OK I "vouched" for this submission because I was in the middle of typing a long comment, and then it got flag-killed. Now that comments are reopened, here's the evidence I wanted to attach:

The claims of Pawn Man's Tiktok is at best, the fantasy of a very excited collector. Weeks after this Tiktok went viral, Pawn Man sat down with New Yorker and sent copies of the photos to an expert, who declared all of them to be not from Nanjing (i.e. they were either reproduction of past famous war photos of China, or personal non-war photos taken by the sailor) [0]

But the non-authenticity of the album could be evident in minutes to anyone who saw his Tiktok; I didn't see his video until it landed on Twitter, but when I checked back on Tiktok, there were at least a few comments alluding to how the few photos glimpsed in the video were obvious duplicates.

On Twitter, it was easy to prove this: take a screencap of any of the Tiktok photos [1], and you'd find hits in Google Image search — which immediately disproves his claims that these photos were "never seen" and all taken by a single U.S. sailor. I DMed him this info within an hour of his tweets and he never acknowledged it; not much longer afterwards, actual historians thoroughly explained/debunked every photo and aspect of the album shown [2]. But Pawn Man never acknowledged this obvious proof, and over the next week kept the charade that he believed the album truly contained never-before seen war atrocity photos

edit: I'll say this: the Pawn Man seems like a genuinely smart and nice guy, definitely great at social media. The fact that so many people believed him sight unseen (I gave him benefit of the doubt at first) is testament to that. But if you'd like additional evidence, check out this r/ireland thread about a Tiktok of his two weeks prior, for a completely different "museum find"; that TikTok was quietly deleted btw:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ireland/comments/wx88dk/so_an_authe...

[0] https://www.newyorker.com/culture/rabbit-holes/on-tiktok-an-...

[1] https://twitter.com/dancow/status/1565271791408488448

[2] https://twitter.com/fakehistoryhunt/status/15653573186986352...

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