7/2/2023 0 Comments Modern times by paul johnsonThe ‘knights of bushido’ were the militant leadership of totalitarian Shintoism, the equivalent, in this oriental setting, of the ‘vanguard élites’ of Lenin and Mussolini, the blackshirts and brownshirts and Chekists of Europe. At all events in the 1920s it was popularized as a code of military honour, identified with extreme nationalism and militarism, and became the justification for the most grotesque practices, first the murder of individuals, later mass-cruelty and slaughter. He was, though, taken much more seriously. 12 at the age of 94, was not quite a prophet without honor in his native Britain. The accounts given of it have been fabricated out of whole cloth, chiefly for foreign consumption… Bushido was unknown until a decade or so ago.’12 It may have been a series of religious exercises, accessible to very few. P aul Johnson, the journalist, editor, and historian who died on Jan. Professor Hall Chamberlain, in an essay The Invention of a New Religion, published in 1912, wrote: ‘Bushido, as an institution or a code of rules, has never existed. “But until the twentieth century there were few references of any kind to bushido.
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