Zhang Xianzhong: The Butcher China Tries Not to Remember
As Chinese people, we often grow up hearing about the horrors committed against us by outsiders. We talk about the atrocities of the Japanese invasion, the devastation unleashed by the Mongols, the massacres, the burnings, the humiliations, and the rivers of blood spilled by foreign conquerors. Those wounds are real, and they deserve to be remembered. But if we are honest with ourselves and willing to look at our own history without blind nationalism clouding the view, we eventually run into an uncomfortable truth: Chinese history is absolutely drenched in Chinese blood spilled by other Chinese people. In fact, some of the worst monsters in our history were not invaders at all. They were our own. Image: Armored cavalry rides forward through heaps of mangled skeletons and bodies. Each rider holds a long spear topped with a severed head; dark smoke and distant fires fill the sky. [ ] One of the darkest examples is 張獻忠, a man so infamous that even centuries later his name...
