[BRIEF NOTE] ID and 21st Century Fascism
Dec. 27th, 2005 03:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldOver at Foreign Dispatches, Abiola Lapite discovers, to his sadness via a Japan Times article by Hiraoki Sato that intelligent design is becoming increasingly popular among certain sets of Japanese. Which sets, you might ask?
So. Intelligent design is popular in Japan with right-wing xenophobes and ultranationalists. The parallels with situations elsewhere in the world--in the United States, say, or elsewhere--I leave to my readers.
I wonder if, as a friend suggested to me, a belief in intelligent design might form a linchpin of 21st century fascism, of a belief in the exceptional singularity of one's own nation and the inferiority of others. One's own nation might be a special creation of God, after all, but the others? I doubt that the Japanese extremists quoted by Abiola would find much terribly wrong with the suggestion that the Koreans and Chinese, unlike the Japanese, are so unfortunate as to have evolved from monkeys.
In other words, unintelligent design has managed to find a welcome amongst "reds under the bed" anti-communists and romantic rightists who reject any facts which stand in the way of attempts to bolster their sense of self-esteem and need for direction in life, i.e., precisely the same sorts of irrationalist "intellectuals" who have always embraced similar pseudoscientific rubbish elsewhere and in other eras; no doubt they'd have been just as fervently behind the old legends of divine imperial descent from "Amaterasu Omikami" of the pre-war years if that sort of thing were still semi-respectable.
So. Intelligent design is popular in Japan with right-wing xenophobes and ultranationalists. The parallels with situations elsewhere in the world--in the United States, say, or elsewhere--I leave to my readers.
I wonder if, as a friend suggested to me, a belief in intelligent design might form a linchpin of 21st century fascism, of a belief in the exceptional singularity of one's own nation and the inferiority of others. One's own nation might be a special creation of God, after all, but the others? I doubt that the Japanese extremists quoted by Abiola would find much terribly wrong with the suggestion that the Koreans and Chinese, unlike the Japanese, are so unfortunate as to have evolved from monkeys.
