Viewing page 4 of 20

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

4

But today that heritage is denied and the creative and progressive forces in the country are stifled under the militarists discipline.

Numberless times and in many ways, the people in Japan have indicated their desire for a more free and democratic life, but each time the military leaders, exercising the control the have kept since feudal days, have stamped out this idea wherever it appeared. They were busy embracing the entirely opposite philosophy of totalitarianism. From Nazi-Germany they took bodily a ready-made ideology of imperialism, nationalism, militarism. They imitated this destructive and sterile system in which all things are directed toward the greater glory of the state.

In such countries the cultural growth and development become cultural decline and decadence. The painting of Nazi-Germany and Japan today is barbaric and oppressive and reflects the false precepts under which it exists.