2013-12-31
This is a continuation of the previous chapter.
I believe the world knew that South Korea’s presidential election was an extremely close contest in which no one knew which candidate would win.
What the world does not know is what happened afterward.
I learned about this because I subscribed to the Japanese edition of Newsweek.
This, the finest weekly news magazine in the world, has only about 90,000 subscribers in Japan.
On a global scale, that must amount to virtually no readership at all.
I previously introduced an essay by a certain Japanese scholar.
Selected as one of The Asahi Shimbun’s external newspaper-page critics, he wrote that, compared with the quality newspapers of Europe and the United States, the standard of Japan’s major newspapers was, to put it in the most extreme terms, like that of kindergarten children.
As far as the major front-page headlines published day after day are concerned, I would not say that his statement was an exaggeration.
That is because it would not be an exaggeration to say that this was precisely what the mass media were like, particularly during “Japan’s Lost Twenty Years.”
Moreover, I pointed out in The Turntable of Civilization that it was they who created “Japan’s Lost Twenty Years.”
However, the circulation of the quality newspapers of Europe and the United States numbers only in the hundreds of thousands.
In other words, the overwhelming majority of people know nothing about the true conditions in other countries.
Even without that, a democratic society is a society in which evil flourishes.
Those who tell lies hold sway.
Oliver Stone’s monumental work conveys this as well.
The greater the liar, the more varied the operations he carries out against such an America and such a world.
Now, this is the truth about what followed the fact mentioned at the beginning, which I came to learn.
In the final column of the Japanese edition of Newsweek, French, British, Chinese, Korean and other residents of Japan take turns writing a regular column.
It was precisely through an article written by a Korean resident of Japan that I first learned about it.
In the presidential election in question, the ruling party used a department resembling a secret police force to conduct a campaign of slander against the opposition candidate, particularly on the internet, and brought the current president to victory.
It was then that I first learned about the reality in South Korea: that this fact had been exposed and that large-scale demonstrations shaking the Park Geun-hye administration were taking place.
I searched for it and further discovered that it was entirely true.
I had no recollection of reading about this fact in either The Asahi Shimbun or The Nikkei, both of which I subscribed to.
(Recently, however, even they have finally begun reporting it.)
Only quality newspapers may barely convey part of the truth about the world, but even in Europe and the United States, their circulation is only at the level of hundreds of thousands.
Most citizens know absolutely nothing about the realities of other countries or the facts of the world.
Do the establishments of Japan and the world, whose members consider themselves elites, know the truth?
The answer is NO.
They are constantly deceived by liars.
The more evil a person is, the more thoroughly he understands this.
And so they continue telling lies without end.
They show not the slightest feeling of gratitude for the fact that Japan saved them repeatedly when they were on the verge of death—conduct entirely befitting complete villains.
This is not limited to South Korea.