earticle

영어

After the 2020 U.S. presidential election, a group of conspiracy theorists known as the QAnons attacked the U.S. Capitol building, claiming President Biden’s fraud and that former President Trump had been elected. Believing the hoax, a shocking attack on the U.S. Capitol took place. This event could be understood as a threat to their own country’s democracy as well, in the sense that it denied the mail ballot system, an important system that supports elections in the United States, a country with a vast land mass. According to Richard Hofstadter, who was the first to analyze American history with this term, Anti-Intellectualism refers to the mass resistance movement to the power of intellectuals. In the history of the United States, where there were no classes such as monarchs or aristocrats, highly educated pastors, lawyers, and researchers formed the ruling elite of the society. Movements by the masses against the existing intellectual authority have contributed greatly to important transformations such as the Independence, Emancipation, and the Civil Rights Movement. As a recent example, I studied a movement of Vietnam War veterans who fought and won a battle against the American Psychiatric Association to have PTSD recognized as an official disease. On the other hand, Japanese Anti-Intellectualism, represented by the “Nippon Kaigi (Japan Conference)”, is a movement against the critical view of prewar Japan's colonial rule and war, which is common in academia, education, and major mass media in postwar Japan. It is richly funded and politically influential due to the presence of Shinto and emerging religious groups and political and business personalities, but it also uses the media of social networking and manga to mobilize the masses. What I can conclude from this paper is that if the academic world changes its closed nature where only researchers evaluate each other and becomes more open to the outside world, the unnecessary hostility of citizens to intellectuals will decrease and they will not be mobilized by false rumors and conspiracy theories.