Monk

It looks like our reading of "1984" is coming in handy. Japan, with it's recent nuclear disaster, is giving us a sharp example of the power of pervasive propaganda:

Over several decades, Japan’s nuclear establishment has devoted vast resources to persuade the Japanese public of the safety and necessity of nuclear power. Plant operators built lavish, fantasy-filled public relations buildings that became tourist attractions. Bureaucrats spun elaborate advertising campaigns through a multitude of organizations established solely to advertise the safety of nuclear plants. Politicians pushed through the adoption of government-mandated school textbooks with friendly views of nuclear power.

The result was the widespread adoption of the belief — called the “safety myth” — that Japan’s nuclear power plants were absolutely safe. Japan single-mindedly pursued nuclear power even as Western nations distanced themselves from it.

The belief helps explains why in the only nation to have been attacked with atomic bombs, the Japanese acceptance of nuclear power was so strong that the accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl barely registered. Even with the crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, the reaction against nuclear power has been much stronger in Europe and the United States than in Japan itself.

If these were darker times, a more deeply fallen world, more in the vicinity of a true Big Brother, we would be hearing that this nuclear plant disaster was a dastardly work of Islamist terrorists, or maybe eco-terrorists, whichever would be seen as better serving the purposes of the Establishment. We are not so far gone as that.

(Source: Norimitsu Onishi for The New York Times)

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Here is some headturning news of how the Japanese are now envious of India's education. The world evolves, and you certainly don't hear of anyone envying America's primary and secondary schools. Asia in motion.

( article )

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