The following is from Masayuki Takayama's column in the latter section of today's weekly Shincho.
It is a must-read not only for Japanese citizens but also for people around the world.
This article also proves that he is the one and only journalist in the postwar world.
A long time ago, an elderly female professor of the Royal Ballet School of Monaco, highly respected by prima ballerinas worldwide, visited Japan.
At that time, she spoke about the significance of an artist's existence.
She said, "Artists are important because they are the only ones who can shed light on hidden and concealed truths and express them."
No one would dispute her words.
It is no exaggeration to say that Masayuki Takayama is not only the one and only journalist in the postwar world but also the one and only artist in the postwar world.
Oe, on the other hand, I don't want to speak ill of the deceased, but Murakami and many others who call themselves writers or think they are artists are not even worthy of the name of artists.
They have only expressed the lies the Asahi Shimbun, and others created rather than shedding light on hidden truths and telling them.
Their existence is not limited to Japan but is the same in other countries worldwide.
In other words, there are only a few true artists.
This paper is another excellent proof that I am right when I say that there is no one in the world today who deserves the Nobel Prize in Literature more than Masayuki Takayama.
It is a must-read not only for the Japanese people but for people worldwide.
Saddam was a great man.
The 21st century it started suddenly with the 9/11 terrorist attacks by Muslim fanatics.
The president of the United States was Bush's son.
He secretly copied Japan's curriculum guidelines and standard tests, turned Texas into the most educated state in the nation, and became president.
But he could be more proficient.
He immediately hit Afghanistan in retaliation, which was a good thing, and then he said he would hit Saddam Hussein in Iraq.
Terrorist leader bin Laden and the perpetrators were almost all from Saudi Arabia.
Saddam had nothing to do with the attacks.
Bush says, "Saddam has weapons of mass destruction."
He looked nothing but a find fault.
He thought it was an excellent opportunity to take Saddam in passing.
Saddam nationalized Iraqi oil, a British monopoly, and used the proceeds for education.
Islam tied women to their homes, but Saddam gave them an education and the right to take off their chadors.
UNESCO also honors Saddam's liberation of women with high praise. He disliked Islamic precepts and "preferred port wine and pork spareribs," according to Con Coughlin's "Saddam Hussein."
His right-hand man, Tariq Aziz, was a genuine Christian, and there was no hint of religion in any of Saddam's sights.
But Bush, in addition to the WMD allegations, had a U.S. newspaper write that Saddam was a "Sunni fanatic who slaughters Shiites."
"The Shiites assassinated Saddam 11 times for his disregard for Islam. So they retaliated. There is no religious quarrel," testified Tariq Aziz, who himself was sentenced to death.
Bush ignored this and teamed up with the British to launch a war against Iraq, and the U.S. military captured Saddam.
The U.S. military turned him over to the Shiite Maliki regime, who immediately pronounced the death penalty and hung Saddam half an hour later.
The words he sent were, "Go to hell."
Saddam, who had stood up to Western tyranny and appealed for Arab national consciousness, was killed as a false charge of a "narrow-minded religious dictator.
There was another "ugly fact" about the Iraq war, the New York Times reported in 2014.
According to the report, a company was ordered to dispose of buried chemical weapons after Iraq was overrun. More than 80 people were injured by leaked poison gas during the operation.
However, the U.S. government concealed this fact and did not even provide sick and wounded soldiers with ill and injured pensions.
In response to this report, the U.S. government reluctantly admitted that it had carried out a manipulation to exhaust both countries at the time of the Iran–Iraq War.
It provided Iran with diplomatic relations that had been severed, with a large quantity of the latest weapons through the back door, and also gave Iraq a poison gas production plant.
As a result, the two countries lost the opportunity for a cease-fire and had to continue the war for eight years.
During that period, I was our correspondent in Tehran.
I saw many generals taken to the southern battlefields and suffering in field hospitals with Yperite.
The war in Iraq, which used Saddam as an excuse, was also aimed at destroying the evidence of the malicious backroom operations of the United States.
This spring, 20 years after the war, the newspapers are reflecting on the war and writing misguidedly, "It is commendable that the dictator Saddam was eliminated" (Asahi Shimbun).
Then, they pompously pointed out that "there were no weapons of mass destruction as a pretext" and concluded with something like, "Let the fact that we were misled by misinformation be a lesson to us.
What were the newspapers looking at?
Western policy toward the Middle East has been consistent.
They don't need heroes in the Middle East. They just need to keep the chaos going and keep the oil flowing.
In retrospect, Czar Pahlavi, who appealed for unity in the Middle East, was ousted, and Iran is still in turmoil.
The same is true of Iraq after Saddam was crushed.
In the "Arab Spring," the democratization of the Middle East initiated by the U.S., Gaddafi, Ben Ali, and Mubarak were all crushed, and all that remains is chaos.
Who is laughing high now?
The newspapers do not report it. Or you can't see it.
