When we look at the cultural suicide occurring across the Americas and Europe today, it is easy to think that it is a relatively new phenomenon. We can point to demographic changes and other factors as being the reasons behind why countries that were once empires are now assailed by guilt, but if it is the truth that we are after, it is not so simple. This sense of societal guilt is a poison that is brewed at home, not abroad, and it is best exemplified by this statement made on the decline of the west by Malcom Muggeridge:
“So the final conclusion would surely be that whereas other civilizations have been brought down by attacks of barbarians from without, ours had the unique distinction of training its own destroyers at its own educational institutions, and then providing them with facilities for propagating their destructive ideology far and wide, all at the public expense. Thus did Western Man decide to abolish himself, creating his own boredom out of his own affluence, his own vulnerability out of his own strength, his own impotence out of his own erotomania, himself blowing the trumpet that brought the walls of his own city tumbling down, and having convinced himself that he was too numerous, labored with pill and scalpel and syringe to make himself fewer. Until at last, having educated himself into imbecility, and polluted and drugged himself into stupefaction, he keeled over–a weary, battered old brontosaurus–and became extinct.” ― Malcolm Muggeridge, Vintage Muggeridge: Religion and Society
While all of what Malcolm Muggeridge says rings very true today, what is truly important about the quote above is that it’s sourced from a book that was published in 1985. Adding onto that, this book was just a compilation of works he had written previously, and it is entirely possible that Malcolm Muggeridge could have made this observation about our societal decline upwards of half a century or more ago. While I’ve written in other articles about how dialectical materialism allows for the accurate prediction of societal changes, it is worth saying that there is a science yet unknown to us that can show how ideas evolve and play out, based possibly on things like institutional dynamics, incentives for careerist ideologues, and so on. With all of that being unnecessarily said, however Malcolm actually came to his conclusions, the man clearly was able to project how society would break down, when going by mere numbers and graphs, it seemed apparent to everyone else that such an end would never come during the time that Malcolm wrote out his observations.
While the west today is assailed with these thoughts, Japan was similarly besieged by radical guilt-trippers in the latter half of the 20th century. As a shining beacon of prosperity attached to an otherwise poor and primitive continent, the Japanese served as canaries in the coal mine for the cultural problems that would later infect the west. An example of this can be found in the Anti-Japaneseism movement in Japan. Forged by the Japanese New Left at the heights of Japan’s economic miracle in the 1970s, the ideology promoted severely gay and retarded ideas about Japanese people. Putting it simply, the movement openly promoted the voluntary extinction of Japanese people and the total erasure of their culture. If the movement had originated in China or Korea, or had emerged within diaspora communities that lived in Japan, it would make more sense for this ideology to emerge out of resentment, but quite like what we see today in the west, Anti-Japaneseism was an ideology created and supported by Japanese people.
While proponents of Anti-Japanism sought to recognize the past injustices of Japan’s imperialism, Anti-Japaneseism identified Japanese people, not the actions of past Japanese governments, as the issue. Just as most left liberals today have dropped the pretense that they simply take issue with the actions of past European empires in favor of just openly declaring their hatred for Europeans, Anti-Japaneseism clearly evolved out of Anti-Japanism along the same lines. The precursor ideas that served as critiques of imperialism, which could have been seen as legitimate by more sensible people, simply snowballed out of control as the ideas gained momentum and traction with less rational elements. The fact that discussions, which could be otherwise healthy for a post-Imperialist society, can descend into such madness should be treated with considerable weight. For those that genuinely mean well, these conversations about past injustices can serve to legitimize hatred and serve as facades for racism. Moving past that, minority groups that may be hostile to the majority can gain undue political clout in such a climate and cause further disorder.
Similar to the developments that we’ve seen in the west surrounding silly organizations like the Black Panthers, Japanese communists also subscribed to their own forms of “minority communism,” in which smaller ethnic groups were given privileged places and prioritized over the majority. Japan’s own form of minority worship, exemplified by the Ainu Revolutionary Theory, espoused the idea that the Ainu, who lived in supposedly primitive communist conditions already, would be better suited to being the leaders of a communist Japan than the standard variety of Japanese people. In addition to that, Ainu Revolutionary Theory stated that because the Ainu lived supposedly as lumpenproletarians, they alone had uniquely revolutionary potential that the Japanese majority did not possess. All in all, the beliefs espoused by the Black Panthers mirror the ideas that were dreamed up by the Ainu Revolitionary Theorists, and when we step away from cultural context for a minute to focus on the outlines that these different organizations take on, it would seem that despite the vast distances from one another, that the proponents of these anti-national “left” ideologies had arrived at the same strains of thought on their own.
While these similarities in beliefs and ideas may seem coincidental, I do not think so. Ideas evolve, just as animals do, to better suit their environments, and when similar economic and cultural conditions exist, no matter the distance in space or time, the same ideas will arise. In the case of Japan, it would seem that some of the proponents of Anti-Japaneseism formed into different terrorist groups, did some dumb things, and led to the disbanding of organizations and the arrest of members that espoused such beliefs. For the Japanese, their society dodged a bullet early on because the crackdowns came so swiftly that the ideas were never allowed to ferment and spread further. For the Western World, this issue has been complicated greatly by the existence of a particularly intelligent, wealthy, and anti-nationalist minority group that has been able to pivot and reshape our society. For the Japanese, the issue of anti-nationalism was only temporary because it was only a fad. For Americans and Western Europeans, the issue of anti-nationalism seems to be terminal because it’s already been pushed in our highest institutions at this point for decades and has set the tone on matters like revising history, mandating demographic changes, and so on.
