This excerpt from Masayuki Takayama’s Distorted Reporting exposes how television programs manipulate scholars to manufacture false narratives. By tracing the ideological violence of Christianity and communism from medieval witch hunts to modern anti-Japan propaganda in European media, it reveals how dogma continues to justify persecution and distortion.

The following is from pages 71 to 78 of Masayuki Takayama’s Distorted Reporting.
The passages marked with ＊～＊ are mine.

The Biased Program “Close-Up Gendai”
The Method of Fabrication Using Scholars

Whether it is Christianity or the Communist Party, there is no existence more dangerous and troublesome than a group that cloaks itself in self-righteousness.

Galileo, who advocated the heliocentric theory, was nearly burned at the stake, and those who, like the Calvinists, attempted to liberate finance and business from church control were all branded as heretics and burned alive.

In southern Germany, 7 percent of the population was burned as witches, and ＊a certain unforgivable man, whom it would be no exaggeration to describe as intellectually inferior and virtually a racist, and who belonged to a newspaper that succeeded in instilling anti-Japanese sentiment in about half of the German people by continuously writing anti-Japanese articles—despite knowing virtually nothing about Japan, having learned only from reading the Asahi Shimbun and the Japan Times—was affiliated with the Süddeutsche Zeitung.
From this, I became convinced that, even today, there must be many incorrigible people in southern Germany because of such a historical background.＊

During the Age of Discovery, the Spaniards slaughtered 30 million Central and South American Indians simply because they were not Christians.

The European Middle Ages are also known as “the thousand years without bathing,” because the Pope, the supreme authority of Christianity, had issued an edict declaring that bathing was harmful to health.

This column continues.