Originally posted on May 4, 2019.
Drawing on an essay by Kaji Nobuyuki, this chapter sharply critiques the methods of left-wing propaganda symbolized by Sunday Morning, emotional manipulation through imagery, the ambiguity of hate-speech arguments, and their relationship to freedom of speech.
It develops a forceful criticism of sensational media tactics that invoke Hitler and the Holocaust to stir emotion.

2019-05-04
Around him, chiming in with knowing looks, were the bloated Jitsurō Terashima, the thin Kang Sang-jung, and two other small-fry sideshow performers.
This was a propaganda method at which the left excels.

The following is from the book below by Kaji Nobuyuki.
It is truly a masterpiece.
It is a book all citizens should read, and it is also the perfect book to read on the road during this ten-day holiday.
Those who trusted my recommendation and bought it at their nearest bookstore will all surely agree with me.
Who Is Inciting Hate? — Kishii Shigetada’s Discourse.
At the New Year, this old man does nothing, tilts back cheap liquor, and passes the time leisurely in a state of drunken dreamlike idleness.
That said, being a mediocre fool, I watch whatever television is at hand, though from New Year’s Day onward almost everything is third-rate entertainment by third-rate performers.
One of them, on the morning of the 4th, was something called Sunday Morning, which apparently airs every week.
Its structure was as follows.
A commentary was given while showing images corresponding to each of the ten articles of some Westerner’s theory of “the crowd.”
Watching it, I immediately understood its aim.
They developed the images and finally showed how Hitler, taking advantage of the foolishness of the masses, gained power, began the massacre of the Jews, committed every possible atrocity, and brought Germany to ruin, and yet even now German demonstrators are shown raising exclusionary voices against foreign workers.
And then they indicate that a rightward drift is putting the nation in danger.
After that, with hate speech, a topic much discussed in Japan, in mind, a commentator named Kishii of the Mainichi Shimbun adds the following.
While implying that the cause of Japan’s rightward drift is Prime Minister Abe, he launches an early preventive attack on the content of the forthcoming Abe statement marking seventy years after the war.
Around him, chiming in with knowing looks, were the bloated Jitsurō Terashima, the thin Kang Sang-jung, and two other small-fry sideshow performers.
This was a propaganda method at which the left excels.
In other words, after repeatedly showing evil images such as Hitler and the massacre of the Jews and brainwashing the viewers, that is, after making use of the foolishness of the masses, they bring it around to this: Abe is Hitler, and just as Germany suffered tragedy, what Abe is doing will lead to tragedy for Japan.
There is no intellectually precise logic there, only emotion using images, or rather, agitation-type propaganda.
In short, it is a sideshow-style “educational news program.”
That is why the intention is to leap in one bound from the massacre of the Jews to the present-day hate speech of Zaitokukai.
There is no logical connection there, only rough emotional accounting by stirring up feelings.
This old man has never had the opportunity to hear what is called hate speech clearly with his own ears, and so cannot make a judgment, and therefore cannot offer an opinion either for or against it.
However, I wish to ask those who advocate banning hate speech.
Clarify the concept and definition of “hate.”
In the case of the massacre of the Jews, we Asians see only the fact of the massacre.
But in the Middle East and Europe, the Jewish question is not a matter of yesterday or today, but one that stretches back hundreds of years.
Christianity, while waging war against Islam through the Crusades, also persecuted the Jews of Judaism.
On that extension of history there was the Nazi massacre of the Jews.
There is also a history in which atonement for such things led to the creation of the state of Israel for the Jews of today.
About such history, we Japanese know only a little, and we also have no real feeling for the persecution of the Jews.
As for the massacre of the Jews, above all else one must place at the foundation the issue of God and the human spirit, and for television to show it cheaply like a newsreel and then try to tie it to today’s hate speech is far too simplistic.
It is discourteous to the Jewish children who were massacred.
Of course, one is free to express the view that hate speech is bad and should stop.
However, if one says so, then one should not speak only from emotion, but should clarify what exactly constitutes hate speech, that is, the concept and definition of “hate.”
If that is absent, and one merely says stop it, then that becomes a denial of freedom of speech.
To put it in the propagandistic language of the left, that would mean “the footsteps of fascism are sounding.”
I ask those who oppose hate speech.
I saw on television a placard at a protest against the U.S. military bases in Okinawa, and it said, “Yankee Go Home.”
It gives the sense of “You American bastards, get out at once,” but is this hate speech, or is it not.
Answer clearly.
The ancients said, the greatly deluded do not understand all their lives.
The greatly foolish never know all their lives.
The greatly deluded, those who wander in confusion, do not understand all their lives.
The greatly foolish never know all their lives.
Zhuangzi, “Heaven and Earth.”