Written on May 18, 2019, this article draws on Professor Furuta Hiroshi’s essay to criticize the modern belief that history inevitably progresses, and sharply argues how ideas derived from Hegel and Marx brought about real-world tragedy and despotism.

2019-05-18
As a result, revolutions occurred in several countries, socialist systems were established, and many people were made unhappy by despotic rule and status systems.
To begin with, are not despotic rule and status systems characteristics of antiquity?

The chapter I published on 2018-09-04 under the title, “This is from the essay by Professor Furuta Hiroshi of the University of Tsukuba Graduate School, published on page 13 of this morning’s Sankei Shimbun, titled ‘There Is Neither “Progress” Nor “Necessity” in History,’” has now entered the real-time best ten.
What follows is from the essay by Professor Furuta Hiroshi of the University of Tsukuba Graduate School, published on page 13 of this morning’s Sankei Shimbun, titled “There Is Neither ‘Progress’ Nor ‘Necessity’ in History.”
It is surely an essay that not only the Japanese people but people all over the world ought to read.
It was only after August four years earlier that I first came to know of the existence of this truly extraordinary scholar and one of the world’s foremost specialists on the Korean Peninsula.
Until then, because I had long subscribed to and read the Asahi Shimbun closely, I knew absolutely nothing about him.
This shows how extreme the Asahi Shimbun’s biased reporting had become in deliberately excluding a scholar of such extraordinary gifts and erudition.
Without informing its readers at all about genuine scholars and journalists such as him and Masayuki Takayama…
the Asahi, like a stick of Kintaro candy…
kept making us read only the arguments of scholars and so-called cultural figures who spoke, in sham moralism and political correctness, of the masochistic view of history and the anti-Japan ideology arising from it, namely the tendency to look down on Japan from above with contempt.
Or rather, we were continually made to read the “plausible lies” of those who “ply the spring trade of anti-Japan sentiment in the Iwanami tower.”
As one result of that…
all Asahi Shimbun subscribers, for example, have had planted even into the unconscious realm the utterly groundless and nonsensical extreme notion that one must not speak ill of South Korea.
Because the other side was a country of “bottomless evil” and “plausible lies,” it is an undeniable fact that Japan and the Japanese people have suffered enormous damage down to the present day.
It is also an undeniable fact that the Asahi Shimbun, even to this day, has not implemented such remedies as placing apology advertisements in the world’s major newspapers admitting that its reporting on the comfort women issue, the Nanjing Massacre, and so on were mistaken reports of its own making, though in truth they were fabricated reports of anti-Japan propaganda.
All emphasis in the text other than the heading is mine.
In the 1970s, the French began making a commotion that the “grand narrative” had ended, that modernity had ended.
The British coolly said that when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, modernity had ended.
The Germans were strong in saying during the 1990s that what had ended was only a small modernity, that true modernity was only now beginning, and that because they would do it once more it would be “reflexive modernization,” but before long that too became vague and faded away.
Americans are different.
Because they have neither antiquity nor the Middle Ages, they have no interest in the period classification called modernity.
For them, it is always the present age.
We were deceived by German philosophy.
As for the Japanese, because of the long-continuing educational system of German philosophy, they were steeped completely in “modernity.”
They believed that “history progresses.”
If one thinks calmly, such a thing cannot be possible.
Did not the Inca, which appeared as an ancient empire in the fifteenth century, get destroyed in the sixteenth century by Pizarro, who came from medieval Spain?
Antiquity and the Middle Ages coexist in the same period, and one side ended in antiquity.
People who thought, “What?
I was deceived,” began to say, “History is jagged.”
Yes, we had been deceived, by Hegel and Marx.
The philosopher Hiromatsu Wataru said, “As for Hegel himself, he thought that history unfolds in the manner of the age of God the Father, the age of God the Son, and the age of God the Holy Spirit that follows, and in his own mind, perhaps he thought of himself as a prophet of the age of God the Holy Spirit” (Itsuki Hiroyuki and Hiromatsu Wataru, What Can Philosophy Do?).
In Marx’s case it was even more ingenious.
He encouraged revolutionaries by saying that history advances through stages, and that socialism and communism would come in the end, so they should work on in confidence.
As a result, revolutions occurred in several countries, socialist systems were established, and many people were made unhappy by despotic rule and status systems.
To begin with, are not despotic rule and status systems characteristics of antiquity?
Then matters became grave because there was carried out there the “collectivization of agriculture,” by which the state directly exploited the peasants.
Was this not precisely a return to the economy of antiquity?
This article will continue.