“Vitally important, devastatingly thorough, and shockingly revealing…. After reading Primetime Propaganda, you’ll never watch TV the same way again.”
—Mark Levin
Movie critic Michael Medved calls Ben Shapiro, “One of our most refreshing and insightful voices on the popular culture, as well as a conscience for his much-maligned generation.” With Primetime Propaganda, the syndicated columnist and bestselling author of Brainwashed, Porn Generation, and Project President tells the shocking true story of how the most powerful medium of mass communication in human history became a vehicle for spreading the radical agenda of the left side of the political spectrum. Similar to what Bernard Goldberg’s Bias and A Slobbering Love Affair did for the liberal news machine, Shapiro’s Primetime Propaganda is an essential exposé of corrupting media bias, pulling back the curtain on widespread and unrepentant abuses of the Hollywood entertainment industry
志恩さんの仲間新羅人のアクエリアンは傍流版入館禁止です
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1128:アクエリアン
19/02/23(土) 09:55:11
Primetime Propaganda: The True Hollywood Story of How the Left Took Over Your TV (英語) ペーパーバック ･ 2012/6/26
“Vitally important, devastatingly thorough, and shockingly revealing…. After reading Primetime Propaganda, you’ll never watch TV the same way again.”
･Mark Levin
Movie critic Michael Medved calls Ben Shapiro, “One of our most refreshing and insightful voices on the popular culture, as well as a conscience for his much-maligned generation.” With Primetime Propaganda, the syndicated columnist and bestselling author of Brainwashed, Porn Generation, and Project President tells the shocking true story of how the most powerful medium of mass communication in human history became a vehicle for spreading the radical agenda of the left side of the political spectrum. Similar to what Bernard Goldberg’s Bias and A Slobbering Love Affair did for the liberal news machine, Shapiro’s Primetime Propaganda is an essential expos･ of corrupting media bias, pulling back the curtain on widespread and unrepentant abuses of the Hollywood entertainment industry
Religious Violence in Contemporary Japan (Nias Monographs) (英語) ペーパーバック – 2000/4/20
Ian Reader (著)
The Tokyo subway attack in March 1995 was just one of a series of criminal activities including murder, kidnapping, extortion, and the illegal manufacture of arms and drugs carried out by the Japanese new religious movement Aum Shinrikyo, under the guidance of its leader Asahara Shoko. Reader looks at Aum's claims about itself and asks, why did a religious movement ostensibly focussed on yoga, meditation, asceticism and the pursuit of enlightenment become involved in violent activities?
イアンリーダー著「Religious Violence in Contemporary Japan」2
Reader discusses Aum's spiritual roots, placing it in the context of contemporary Japanese religious patterns. Asahara's teaching are examined from his earliest public pronouncements through to his sermons at the time of the attack, and statements he has made in court. In analysing how Aum not only manufactured nerve gases but constructed its own internal doctrinal justifications for using them Reader focuses on the formation of what made all this possible: Aum's internal thought-world, and on how this was developed.
イアンリーダー著「Religious Violence in Contemporary Japan」3
Reader argues that despite the horrors of this particular case, Aum should not be seen as unique, nor as solely a political or criminal terror group. Rather it can best be analysed within the context of religious violence, as an extreme example of a religious movement that has created friction with the wider world that escalated into violence.
イアンリーダー著「Religious Violence in Contemporary Japan」4
S. Tanaka
5つ星のうち5.0
vivid, thorough, chilling
2013年1月22日 - (Amazon.com)
This is such a well written book. I'd read Murakami's "Underground," which was a series of interviews with victims and perpetrators of the Aum attacks. But that book, while doing its job in humanizing those involved, does very little to explain how events like this come about. I've always resisted the idea of "those crazy brainwashed ____" as a way of describing these kinds of groups. Ian Reader meticulous documents the process by which an innocuous-seeming religious group gradually turns obsessive, hateful, paranoid, and deadly. It's also about as much of a page-turner as this kind of a study can be.
Destroying the World to Save It: Aum Shinrikyo, Apocalyptic Violence, and the New Global Terrorism
Introduction: Ends and Beginnings
It is not true that there is nothing new under the sun. To be sure, the oldest human emotions continue to haunt us. But they do so in new settings with new technology, and that changes everything.
On March 20, 1995, Aum Shinrikyō, a fanatical Japanese religious cult, released sarin, a deadly nerve gas, on five subway trains during Tokyo’s early-morning rush hour. A male cult member boarded each of the trains carrying two or three small plastic bags covered with newspaper and, at an agreed-upon time, removed the newspaper and punctured the bags with a sharpened umbrella tip. On the trains, in the stations where they stopped, and at the station exits, people coughed, choked, experienced convulsions, and collapsed. Eleven were killed and up to five thousand injured. Had Aum succeeded in producing a purer form of the gas, the deaths could have been in the thousands or hundreds of thousands. For sarin, produced originally by the Nazis, is among the most lethal of chemical weapons. Those releasing it on the trains understood themselves to be acting on behalf of their guru and his vast plan for human salvation.
Aum and its leader, Shōkō Asahara, were possessed by visions of the end of the world that are probably as old as death itself. Asahara also held in common with many present-day Christian prophets of biblical world-ending events a belief that Armageddon would be connected to those most secular of “end-time” agents, nuclear warheads or chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction.
But his cult went a step further. It undertook serious efforts to acquire and produce these weapons as part of a self-assigned project of making Armageddon happen. For the first time in history, end-time religious fanaticism allied itself with weapons capable of destroying the world and a group embarked on the mad project of doing just that. Fortunately, much went wrong. After all, it is not so easy to destroy the world. But we have a lot to learn from the attempt.
The impulses that drove Asahara and Aum are by no means unique to him and his group. Rather, Aum was part of a loosely connected, still-developing global subculture of apocalyptic violence—of violence conceived in sweeping terms as a purification and renewal of humankind through the total or near-total destruction of the planet. One can observe these inclinations in varied groups on every continent. Their specific transformative projects may be conceived as religious or political, the violence to be employed either externally directed or suicidal or both at once. One can find certain psychological parallels to Aum Shinrikyō in, for instance, the Jewish fundamentalists who encouraged the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, in Palestinian Hamas suicide bombers, and in Hindu and Muslim fundamentalists who act violently on behalf of claims to ancient sacred places on the Indian subcontinent. But my exploration of Aum led me particularly to the apocalyptic inclinations of American groups like the Charles Manson Family, Heaven’s Gate, and Peoples Temple, as well as the Oklahoma City bombers, Aryan supremacists, and paramilitary survivalists on the radical right. Just as we now take for granted the interconnectedness of the global economic system, so must we learn to do the same for the growing global system of apocalyptic violence. Outbreaks anywhere reverberate everywhere.
Increasingly widespread among ordinary people is the feeling of things going so wrong that only extreme measures can restore virtue and righteousness to society. When the world comes to be experienced as both hateful and dead or dying, a visionary guru can seize on such feelings while promising to replace them with equally absolute love and life-power. Nor are any of us completely free of those inner struggles. The sentiments that created Aum Shinrikyō are part of the spiritual and psychological ambience each of us inhabits day by day.
Apocalyptic violence has been building worldwide over the last half of the twentieth century. Having studied some of the most destructive events of this era, I found much of what Aum did familiar, echoing the totalistic belief systems and end-of-the-world aspirations I had encountered in other versions of the fundamentalist self. I came to see these, in turn, as uneasy reactions to the openness and potential confusions of the “protean” self that history has bequeathed us. I had been concerned with these matters since the mid-1950s, when I first studied “thought reform” (or “brainwashing”) in Communist China and then among American cultic religious groups. I came to recognize the power of a totalized environment for mobilizing individual passions in the creation of fierce, often deeply satisfying expressions of collective energy.
Aum’s obsession with nuclear weapons and with the atomic destruction of Hiroshima in particular connected with interview work I had done in that city in the early 1960s on the psychological effects of the atomic bomb and on the psychology of the survivor. In subsequent work I had explored the dangers of “nuclearism,” the embrace and even deification of nuclear weaponry so that potential agents of mass destruction become a source of security, life-power, and even at times salvation. My work in the early 1970s with Vietnam veterans who told of destroying a village—indeed, much of a country—in order to save it had reverberations in Aum, where the ambition was considerably greater: destroying a world in order to save it. There were striking parallels in Aum to behavior I encountered in the 1970s and 1980s while studying the Nazis’ utilization not only of professional killers but also of killing professionals—in this case, doctors. In Aum, too, doctors were central to the cult’s reversal of healing and killing. They participated in individual murders and had an important role, together with other scientists, in producing and releasing deadly chemical and biological weapons.
Aum is now viewed throughout the world as the primary example of the extraordinary dangers posed by private terrorist groups arming themselves with versions of “the poor man’s atomic bomb.” For Aum was a small antigovernment group claiming ten thousand followers in Japan, about fourteen hundred of whom were renunciants, or monks, at thirty facilities across the country; thirty thousand in Russia (a figure that has been disputed); and a handful in West Germany, Sri Lanka, and the United States. Yet this relatively tiny organization managed to manufacture, stockpile, and release deadly sarin gas first in the city of Matsumoto, northwest of Tokyo, and then in Tokyo itself. It also prepared equally deadly anthrax bacillus and botulinus toxin, releasing them several times in Tokyo and nearby areas (including in the vicinity of two American military bases), largely unsuccessfully but with effects not yet fully known. Between 1990 and 1995 the cult staged at least fourteen chemical and biological attacks of varying dimensions. Aum also made inquiries, particularly in Russia, into acquiring or producing nuclear weapons. It was the grandiose plan of Shōkō Asahara to employ this weaponry to initiate World War III, a global holocaust of unprecedented proportions that would in turn trigger a hoped-for Armageddon. In his fantasies he saw the United States as a major military participant in this apocalyptic project.
But plans and fantasies, however earnest and elaborate, are not the same as action. A simple but terrible question therefore haunts this study: How did Aum Shinrikyō come to cross the crucial threshold from merely anticipating Armageddon to taking active steps to bring it about?
My way of going about answering this question was, as always, to talk to people—to interview those involved. I have been doing that for decades in applying a psychological perspective to historical problems. Here, during five trips to Japan between 1995 and 1997, I was able to conduct intensive interviews with ten former members of Aum, eight men and two women, averaging more than five hours with each person. Since the guru himself and most of his leading disciples were in prison and inaccessible, the people I interviewed tended to be at either the lower or the mid echelons of a very hierarchical organization. Only a privileged inner circle of Asahara’s highest-ranking followers were told of the more violent aspects of the guru’s visionary plans, and even then often incompletely. Most of those I interviewed had little or no knowledge of the various facets of Aum violence. But while part of Aum they had to do considerable psychological work to fend off that knowledge in the face of the evidence around them.
One can look at the guru of a fanatical new religion or cult* as either everything or nothing. The everything would acknowledge the guru’s creation of his group and its belief system, as well as his sustained control over it—in which case the bizarre behavior of Aum Shinrikyō could be understood as little more than a reflection of Shōkō Asahara’s own bizarre ideas and emotions. The nothing would suggest that the guru is simply a creation of the hungers of his disciples, that he has no existence apart from his disciples, that any culture can produce psychological types like him, that without disciples, there is no guru. Both views have elements of truth, but the deeper truth lies in combining them, in seizing upon the paradox.
Gurus and disciples are inevitably products of a particular historical moment. They represent a specific time and place, even as they draw upon ancient psychological and theological themes. As our contemporaries, they are, like the rest of us, psychologically unmoored, adrift from and often confused about older value systems and traditions. That unmoored state has great importance. Here I would stress only that a guru’s complete structural and psychological separateness from a traditional cultural institution—in Asahara’s case an established religion—permits him to improvise wildly in both his theology and his personal behavior, to become a “floating guru.” Disciples in turn are open to any strange direction he may lead them and contribute their own unmoored fantasies without the restraining force that a religious or institutional hierarchy might provide.
The guru narrative is always elusive. The guru appears to us full-blown, catches our attention because of what he, with disciples, has done—all the more so when that is associated with any kind of violence, no less mass murder. We then look back on the guru’s life history to try to understand his part in this culminating act. But while we should learn all we can about him, we are mistaken if we believe that his childhood—or his past in general—will provide a full explanation of that act.
In 1981, at age twenty-six, during his troubled Tokyo days, he joined Agonshū, one of the most successful of Japan’s “new religions.” (The term refers to religious sects that have arisen since the late nineteenth century, often beginning with the vision of an ordinary person who becomes the sect’s founder and borrowing eclectically from various religious traditions.) Although he was later to disparage Agonshū and even claim that it had been spiritually harmful to him during his three years of membership, there is every evidence that he derived from it many of his subsequent religious principles. Indeed, he found there a powerful guru model, sixty-year-old Seiyū Kiriyama, a highly charismatic figure. Kiriyama claimed, as the British scholar Ian Reader tells us, “miraculous and extraordinary happenings, visitations, and other occurrences that create[d] a sense of dramatic vigor and expectation around the religion and its leader, endow[ed] them with a legitimacy and suggest[ed] that they possess[ed] a special, chosen nature.” In those three years Asahara was in effect apprenticing for joining the ranks of the “dynamic, charismatically powerful … religious figures” who, Reader says, “have frequently, by their very natures, upset or challenged [Japanese] social harmony and norms.”
From Kiriyama and Agonshū, Asahara also drew upon a variety of ideas and practices that would become important in Aum: expressions of esoteric Buddhism, mystical forms of yoga, and forms of self-purification aimed at freeing oneself from bad karma. He was also much influenced by Agonshū’s use of American New Age elements from the human-potential movement, individual psychology, and applied neurology. It was here as well that he first encountered the writings of Nostradamus, the sixteenth-century French astrologer and physician who predicted the end of the world with the coming of the year 2000. Asahara, who was to radically alter, supplement, and totalize these influences, soon became a fledgling guru, acquiring a few disciples by the time he left Agonshū.
The emerging guru may have a number of visions, but one in particular usually serves as a crucial illumination and a sacred mandate for a special spiritual mission. This should not be seen as simply a matter of calculation or fakery: intense personal conviction is essential to the guru’s success. But that conviction can be helped considerably by grandiose ambitions and manipulative inclinations, which themselves can be enhanced by impressive demonstrations of superhuman powers. Prior to his main vision, Asahara claimed to have experienced during his early period in Agonshū an “awakening of Kundalinī”—a concept of mystical yoga in which one gains access to the cosmic energy that ordinarily lies “sleeping” at the base of the spine. An accomplished practitioner, he opened a yoga school in Tokyo at about this time and was to gain many early converts through the skills he demonstrated.
In 1984 Asahara founded Aum Shinsen no Kai. Aum (often rendered in English as Om or Ohm), a Sanskrit word that represents the most primal powers of creation and destruction in the universe, is often chanted in Buddhism as part of a mantra or personal incantation. Shinsen no Kai means “circle of divine hermits” or “wizards” and has a strong suggestion of esoteric supernatural power. Asahara also created a commercial enterprise, the Aum Corporation. It was to have the important function of publishing his books.
In 1985 Asahara became famous when a photograph of him “levitating” appeared in a popular occult magazine, Twilight Zone, identifying him as the “Aum Society representative.” The ability to levitate is considered to reflect extraordinarily high spiritual attainment. In his case it was apparently simulated by means of an upward leap from the lotus position along with a bit of trick photography. The placing of the picture in such a visible outlet was an early example of Asahara’s strong sense of the importance of the media.
That same year, at the age of thirty, Asahara experienced his central, self-defining vision. While he was wandering as a “homeless monk” near the ocean in northern Japan, a deity appeared before him and ordained him as Abiraketsu no Mikoto, “the god of light who leads the armies of the gods” in an ultimate war to destroy darkness and bring about the kingdom of Shambhala—in Tibetan and other Buddhist traditions, a utopian society of spiritually realized people. The vision was announced to the world in a Japanese New Age magazine in the form of an interview with Asahara.
