/jp/ - Otaku Culture

Day after day the bourgeois world are witnesses to the phenomenon of spreading poison among the people through the instrumentality of the theatre and the cinema, gutter journalism and obscene books; and yet they are astonished at the deplorable ‘moral standards’ and ‘national indifference’ of the masses. As if the cinema bilge and the gutter press and suchlike could inculcate knowledge of the greatness of one’s country, apart entirely from the earlier education of the individual.

I then came to understand, quickly and thoroughly, what I had never been aware of before. It was the following:

The question of ‘nationalizing’ a people is first and foremost one of establishing healthy social conditions which will furnish the grounds that are necessary for the education of the individual. For only when family upbringing and school education have inculcated in the individual a knowledge of the cultural and economic and, above all, the political greatness of his own country – then, and then only, will it be possible for him to feel proud of being a citizen of such a country. I can fight only for something that I love. I can love only what I respect. And in order to respect a thing I must at least have some knowledge of it.

As soon as my interest in social questions was once awakened I began to study them in a fundamental way. A new and hitherto unknown world was thus revealed to me.