2010-8-1
This is a chapter I published on August 1, 2010, under the title “Why the United States Is a Great Nation Without Parallel in History.”
This article, too, had disappeared from search results after being subjected to the criminal act of search interference by a man whom readers know well.
I am republishing it after correcting its paragraph breaks and other formatting.

The United States is so great that no other country in human history can be compared with it because it is the first society in human history founded on intellect and on true freedom.
In Europe, which remains a class society even today, the condition of the working class in the nineteenth century could fairly be called miserable.
Lenin was able to establish a communist state in Russia because of the following conditions there.
As anyone who has read Russian literature closely will know, Russian aristocrats, including Tolstoy, were nobles whose estates stretched beyond the horizon.
Their lives, which allowed them never to work, were sustained by the serfs who lived on their estates.
Giuseppe Sinopoli, the Italian conductor of the highest order who died prematurely, spoke as follows about Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1, a work as familiar to ears around the world as popular music:
“Tchaikovsky’s music cannot truly be understood without knowing that Russia’s intelligentsia at the time was gripped by suicidal longings. There is something in it that cannot be explained away as mere sweetness and melancholy.”
The security of their lives was guaranteed by serfs whose status was even lower than that of peasants.…
If an intellectual felt no pang of conscience or doubt about the fact that his life depended on people whose condition was equal to, or perhaps worse than, that of the Black slaves whose enslavement the United States overcame, he was no intellectual at all, but simply a fool.
I would go so far as to say that there is nothing wrong with calling today’s Japanese intellectuals mere fools.
Poor members of Europe’s working class reached the Statue of Liberty in New York with great hopes and boundless dreams: to escape the prison that had confined them all their lives, to become free, to use their talents, and to choose the course of their one and only life.
After completing the formalities, the immigrants saw the words written on the back of the statue’s breast: “O ship now wrecked, come and find refuge on my shore.”
They never forgot those words for the rest of their lives.
During the Second World War, the United States made a film like that, with Jennifer Jones, whom I love, as its heroine.

Now, to return to the answer to the question with which I began: the United States emerged as the first hegemonic power in human history that did not use its supremacy solely for its own sake.
It differed from other countries, which had regarded a hegemonic power as one that made colonies of other nations and imposed its own demands through military and economic might.
And then there is our own country.
Let me quote an editorial in the Asahi Shimbun this morning (August 1, 2010).
“The era of continuing growth has ended. The approach of reconciling the demands of interest groups, distributing budgets, and handing down systems has surely reached its limit. The ways of Kasumigaseki, too, are being pressed to change.
Democracy shows signs of wear and fraying. We have no choice but to search once more for a way in which many people can share burdens and responsibilities. Let us nurture the seeds of deliberation.”

That the turn has come for a country dominated by media that understand nothing of this sort to become a hegemonic power standing alongside and complementing the United States is a tragedy for the world as well.
Its inward gaze… The fact that, even after sixty years, this country does not have a single weekly magazine like Newsweek clearly proves it.
The “turntable of civilization” has turned to a country that has no idea at all of its role in the world, and that is why the world is now extremely unstable.
It is because Japan is such a country.

I would go so far as to say that there is not a single American who lives by a philosophy of resignation that declares, “The era of continuing growth has ended” (although the country is now struggling to deal with the aftermath of the great financial upheaval).

So you have grown old. What of it?
Will the children and grandchildren you invoke at every opportunity not grow?
Are you saying that they are less capable than you; that they will never recognize the truth, understand their country’s role, bring new energy to it, humbly devote themselves to learning from the past to create something new and make great inventions of worldwide importance, or begin to show a frontier spirit equal to America’s?
What kind of intellect are you using when you speak?

I will accept what the editorial says up to its reference to Kasumigaseki. But:
“Democracy shows signs of wear and fraying”… What thoroughly second-rate people they are.
The person who wrote this editorial surely feels no guilt about what they themselves have done.
At what point in these past sixty years, I ask you, did Japan’s democracy become something founded on freedom and intellect to a degree equal to America’s?

Most of the music coming from the TV is unbearable to hear; to put it harshly, it is nothing but noise.
Music with a shallow sound and not a trace of anything that could be called philosophy.
Music is sound, and it is no exaggeration to say that its depth expresses the level of a country’s culture.
Your foolish pronouncements… You are truly incorrigible authoritarians, speaking nonsense from a position of foolish superiority.
When it comes to music, there are at least three countries in the world where it is not a kindergarten recital put on by people who merely want to appear on TV or become famous.
Canada, the United States, and Britain… Listen to the music being made now in Canada in particular, where so many of today’s finest bands and singers can be found.
They grew up listening to all the music made by the wonderful bands and singers who came before them, and their sound could only belong to the present… It is a wonderfully deep sound.
That is what intellect means, and I would say without hesitation that people like you possess a second-rate intellect.
It is because you have neither true freedom nor intellect.
When, I ask you, did a country whose TV repeats childish things every day ever complete its democracy?