Ritual Sacrifice: The Sheep and the Whale & Marjorie Chan's newest, Nanking Winter

Oh, It's always nice when a head of state sanctions the collective denial of atrocity:)
Read on re. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's recent remarks about what the article meekly calls "the rape of Nanking" - and others more accurately describe as a holocaust...

http://www.thestar.com/article/187793

It's interesting that the word "holocaust" (from the Greek holokauston) originally meant a sacrifice totally burned by fire; it was used in the translation of I Samuel 7:9, "a burnt offering to God." It has since come to mean large scale atrocity - or destruction - the catastrophic annahilation of people...
Somehow humans have always had complicated relationship with the idea of the "sacrifice" - the notion that we MUST destroy some, in order to protect some others, which underlies so much of the rationale for routine plunder and games of state....

I'm guessing it goes like this? "Some must die or suffer -
for reasons unknown,
or known to few,
maybe on behalf of others,
but mostly for reasons just inexplicable...."

Kind of cool to note that the theme of sacrifice seems to play central role in the archetypes that populate The Sheep and the Whale...it shows up in the ritual sacrifice of the slave/sheep; and in the contrasting ideal of the doctor/Whale.
And next year, we can look forward to grappling with Nanking Winter, the new play from Marjorie Chan. Inspired by real-life events, it explores the lives of those affected in the past and the present by the Nanking Massacre of 1937 when the Japanese invaded the then-capital of China. It will premiere in February 2008.