Reporting and its corruption in the West

Stephen Sefton, Tortilla con Sal, May 18^th 2021

Sovereign nation states and international law are the majority world's only defense against global predatory corporate elites and the governments those elites effectively own. For that reason, as many people have noted, the US government and its allies promote what they call a “rules based order”, one defined by them, exempting them from well established international legal principles of non-aggression and non-intervention. An integral part of the foreign policy agenda derived from this abandonment of international law is the abusive manipulation of human rights reporting as a pretext for intervention and aggression.

With the utmost cynicism, the Western human rights industry generally ignores human rights violations by their own governments' terrorist proxies, claiming their remit only covers abuses by governments, which means their reports are bound to mislead international opinion. That has been the case from Syria to Venezuela, from Iran to China, from Ukraine to Nicaragua. The duplicity is supported by corporate control of the main human rights institutions and non profits,of international news media, of the main social media platforms, of academic research. That enormous apparatus is essential to maintain the illusion that reporting in all its varieties operates independently of governments and the elites that control them.

So it is generally very unhelpful to focus on journalism as if it deserves special reverence or to think that if only journalism and news and social media could be made more democratic then people would then have revolutionary, empowering access to more truthful accounts of world affairs. Journalism is no more than a sub-category of reporting, which, in some guise or other, is a basic component of practically all human activity. Currently, plenty of non-journalists do reporting far superior to what the great majority of recognized journalists actually do.

Corporate investment in and hence control of reporting by the non-profit industry, by the academic research industry, in social media and global news media signifies much more than a political ideological identity between major multinational corporations and their countries' governments. At a deeper level, each one of those huge investment operations creates global asset classes that have been increasingly leveraged for influence. As Cory Morningstar and others have shown, those asset classes have been refined relentlessly over decades to facilitate control of domestic policy (Green New Deal, 4th Industrial revolution, Great Reset, policy on COVID-19), in North America and Europe especially.

But they also facilitate attempts at global control overseas, for example regime change operations, so as ultimately to extend even more profitable Western corporate predation further and deeper around the world and even into outer space. That is why reporting by the Western human rights industry targets sovereign nation states resisting the demands of North American and European Union country governments and the interests of those governments' corporate elite owners. For example, the recent volte-face by Human Rights Watch in its reporting on Palestine should very much be seen in those terms.

Western elite corporate interests see an imperative to shift support to a One State solution in Palestine because, otherwise, the current zionist trajectory will end in a regional showdown in which Israel would probably suffer massive destruction and, even supported by its US and European allies, is far from certain to prevail. Whereas an internationally accepted unified State under neoliberal governance would ensure continued Western control and influence in a region the US and its allies regard as vital to their global interests.

After decades of white-washing Israeli crimes, it is extremely unlikely Human Rights Watch suddenly had an epiphany of humanitarian enlightenment. Their directors and those of other similar corporate funded international human rights non profits make sure their organizations report in accordance with the interests of their elite corporate supporters. The same applies to Ireland's recent denunciation of Israeli policy in Palestine. The Irish government would certainly not have made it without the prior approval of powerful figures and interests in the US and the EU.

A reverse corroboration of that view is that, while the Western human rights industry may now at long last be starting to report the truth about Israel's genocidal destruction of Palestine, they continue to demonize relentlessly the governments of Bolivia, Cuba, Iran, Nicaragua, Syria and Venezuela. All these countries have defended their sovereignty as independent nation states with national human development policies focused on the needs of the human person of their populations, rather than on the corporate imperative of profit. So, those countries are the object of much more hostile and dishonest institutional, academic, NGO and news media reporting than countries like, in Latin America, Colombia, Honduras, or Haiti.

In those countries, the ruling oligarchies all collaborate with US and European corporate elites. By contrast, government policy in Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela has exposed the futility and sterility of US and allied government policy efforts to promote corporate-led economic and social development. This reality is perhaps most clear in Nicaragua where so far neither the failed coup attempt of 2018, nor the country's COVID-19 outbreak, nor sanctions by the US and its allies have managed to set back the gains of the last fifteen years of Sandinista government. Various independently confirmed objective measures bear this out. But reporting in North America and Europe makes sure that reality is almost universally suppressed.