The massacre was enabled by a culture that had dehumanized the enemy in advance

Chang traces how Japanese soldiers arrived at Nanking already primed to see Chinese people as subhuman. Military training emphasized absolute obedience and framed the Chinese as an inferior race standing in the way of Japan's destiny in Asia. Officers reinforced this through harsh discipline that brutalized their own troops, who then redirected that brutality outward.

This matters because it undercuts the idea that what happened was a sudden, inexplicable frenzy. Chang argues the atrocities were the predictable output of an ideological and institutional pipeline: propaganda that stripped the enemy of moral standing, a command culture that rewarded ruthlessness, and a battlefield where restraint had been trained out of soldiers rather than into them.

Her point generalizes beyond this one event — mass violence against civilians usually has an infrastructure of preparation behind it, built well before the killing starts.

Takeaway: atrocity is rarely spontaneous; it is manufactured by the stories and systems that precede it.