Stephen Sefton, June 6th 2022
In earlier videos I've argued that North American and European information outlets long ago abandoned good faith reporting and that for some time now the primary role of Western reporting of all kinds has been the purposeful creation of false beliefs that eventually turn into false memories in order to facilitate the policies of the West's ruling classes against the interests of their countries' peoples.
The epitome of that reality has been the sadistic, cynically deceitful persecution of Julian Assange for reporting in good faith about heinous US and allied government crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan.
As examples of the creation of false beliefs and false memories, I drew the obvious parallel between false Western accounts of the origins of the Korean War in 1950 and the big lie that Russia's current offensive in Ukraine is an illegal, unprovoked aggression.
But examples abound of false memories created by Western reporting from the non-existent Tianamen student massacre in Beijing, to the non-existent Douma gas attacks in Syria to the completely baseless Russiagate accusations in the United States.
I also note how independent reporters covering events in any country aggressively targeted by Western governments, like Venezuela or Syria, for example, consistently confirm how reporting on those countries in the West, by media, NGOs, academics, international institutions and governments, is as often as not the direct opposite of the truth.
A few independent reporters of different political viewpoints have repeatedly exposed Western falsehoods about, not just Syria and Venezuela, but Iran, Libya, Palestine, Syria and Yemen, Donbass, Bolivia, Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela,, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Rwanda and the Congo, Thailand and Myanmar and others, most obviously Russia and China. In all these cases, people in those countries trying to report events faithfully find themselves constantly debunking one cynically deceitful account after another from Western news and information sources.
The sinister, absurd Russiagate hoax lasting from 2016 to the present day showed how that same process has been applied also to domestic politics in the West.
In every case, Western reporting systematically misrepresents specific incidents and issues so as to promote whatever grossly false memory the Western ruling classes need to justify their sadistic hypocritical aggression against the countries, political movements or even individuals like Julian Assange and others who resist them.
The customary pattern is to make false accusations of horrifying crimes or repression while falsely portraying Western approved figures and movements as enjoying overwhelming spontaneous peaceful majority support.
In practically every case the exact reverse is true. Here in Nicaragua in 2018, Western media, NGOs, international institutions like the UN and the OAS, all claimed that the events between April 18th and July 17th consisted of peaceful protests brutally repressed by President Ortega. The very opposite is true. The protests themselves were murderously violent from the start.
The OAS and UN bodies reporting on Nicaragua deliberately omitted testimony from many hundreds of victims of coordinated well-organized opposition violence and suppressed well documented information provided by the Nicaraguan authorities. Instead, they repeated practically every false allegation from opposition news outlets and US and EU government funded NGOs. They made no serious effort at genuine corroboration of very serious allegations against the Nicaraguan authorities and in this way legitimized the big lie of murderous government repression of peaceful protests.
This is the same behaviour as Western reporting of events in Libya and Syria in 2011 or of the political turmoil in Thailand, Venezuela and Ukraine in the years up to and after 2014. In every case, apparently legitimate protests were quickly exploited by well organized, murderously violent, armed groups seeking to overthrow or destabilize the country's government. But North American media, NGOs, governments and international institutions suppressed the truth, criminalizing the authorities concerned so as to justify the West's financial and trade sanctions, concerted diplomatic isolation, support for armed, violent opposition forces and outright military aggression.
This endlessly repeated pattern of aggression and falsehood depends on outright censorship and systematic vilification of reporters contradicting the false accounts of information outlets supporting either overtly, implicitly or passively the Western ruling class agenda. Such a context renders indispensable independent reporting of first-hand testimony that can be corroborated either by means of documentation or separate reporting sources.
That kind of reporting contrasts strongly with overwhelmingly false predominant Western reporting practice. It also allows readers and viewers to make up their own minds. These two components are the hallmark of genuine good faith reporting. They explain why corporate and political elites in North America and Europe act increasingly to suppress the truth about their support for terrorist extremism in Syria, for the Nazi controlled government in Ukraine and the fascist forces that have tried and failed to take over Bolivia, Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela.
I hope these remarks are helpful for people trying to understand the dysfunctional coverage of international affairs prevalent in North America and Europe and I hope to explore this issue and its implications further in other videos.