Stephen Sefton, Tortilla con Sal, 31 de mayo 2023
Russia's military offensive in Ukraine is likely to inflict a categorical strategic defeat on the corporate and political elites of North America and Europe. As it develops even now, that defeat is breaking the West's centuries old chokehold on the sovereign development of the majority world. However, faithful reporting of that reality is systematically suppressed because good faith reporting has practically vanished now across the Western world, not just in journalism but also in research and reporting by NGOs or academics and institutions of all kinds.
North American and European governments and corporations have long controlled Western reporting outlets and used them to wage aggressive psychological warfare against target countries overseas and too as a means of systematic repression against their domestic populations. One important purpose of this comprehensive corruption of reporting standards in North America, Europe and allied Pacific countries is to make genuinely truthful accounts appear untrustworthy and disreputable if they contradict the official versions authorized by Western corporate and political elites.
The traditional concept that reporting a true and fair view of events can be done by posing relevant, appropriate questions in good faith about those events and their context has long been abandoned. Reporting errors and falsehoods are covered up or left unacknowledged, even when they have been meticulously exposed independently. Western reporting generally distorts events to such extremes as to render even the most absurd accounts plausible. The corruption of reporting standards among the very sources that should uphold and defend them, makes good faith investigation of controversial events practically impossible at all levels except by independent, and thus readily marginalized, sources of dissent.
In essence what the undeniable fascist union of corporate and political power elites in North America and Europe has done is to reshape reporting practice as an infinite false information feedback loop. Its overriding purpose is the systematic creation of demented false beliefs among their countries' populations. With constant repetition over time, those false beliefs become false memories which governments exploit to justify policies benefiting the elites they serve, against the fundamental interests of their respective countries' peoples.
A couple of things are worth remembering in this dismaying context.
Firstly, at a global level, people in the West committed to truthful reporting of international affairs are not in a minority. Most by far of the majority world, know very well the endless crimes and perverse duplicity of Western corporate and political elites. So people who challenge false Western reporting and try reporting events in a true and fair way should very much remember that and not be intimidated by the relentless marginalization they experience.
Secondly, while our knowledge of events may be incomplete, the events we report and the evidence about them are determinate. So good faith reporting from countries targeted by the US and its allies based on first hand testimony and good documentation can and does expose the downright lies and systematic distortion of the great majority of Western reporting outlets. Good faith reporting allows people to make up their own minds as much as possible which is what genuine reporters do in challenging false official accounts with well founded reporting of their own.
The principal false belief promoted by practically all Western information outlets is that Western governments mean well and seek to promote good in the world. A corollary of that false belief is that the peoples of countries suffering aggression by the governments of North America, Europe and their Pacific allies deserve to be destabilized, attacked, bombed, murdered, wounded, starved, made homeless and displaced in order to change their governments. Despite the unimaginable suffering Western ruling elites have inflicted on the majority world, Western populations generally continue in the demented false belief that their societies are morally superior to the rest of the world.
They do so thanks to the sinister wizardry of the West's vast false information networks of news and entertainment media, academic and scientific research, NGO reports, and reports from national and international institutions and organizations of all kinds. Despite these massive resources successfully promoting generally completely insane false beliefs in their service, the West's ruling classes still feel so insecure that they have resorted to the most crude and odious censorship of genuinely independent reporting, imprisoning dissdents, shutting down foreign media outlets and limiting or denying prominent dissenting outlets access to leading internet platforms.
Solidarity with victims of censorship, persecution and suppression is an absolute imperative. Defending peoples' right to good faith reporting means we shouldn't let our solidarity get corrupted by merely ideological differences. The ultimate indictment of the corrupt perverse collapse in reporting integrity in North America and Europe and tof he totalitarian policies of despotic censorship has been the supremely odious false coverage of the persecution of Julian Assange and the criminal silence about the systematic injustice of his cruel, faithless, dishonest legal and judicial treatment. Western information outlets have applied the same hateful double standard in the case of Ukraine's systematic repression of free speech, most recently the imprisonment of Gonzalo Lira.
The progressive disappearance of genuine reporting from most Western information outlets ever since the end of Word War Two has accelerated fast over the last decade or so. Domestically, the West's ruling elites have intensifed their long standing psychological warfare against their own peoples so as to try and slow down the collapse of their accustomed power, control, influence and prestige. Overseas, they deploy relentless comprehensive psychological warfare against any government or political movement that resists them. Everyone reporting independently from countries targeted by the US and its allies can testify to this and to the false beliefs promoted in the West about those countries and their governments.
Examples abound of false memories created by Western reporting , ranging from the non-existent Tianamen “student massacre”, to the non-existent Douma gas attacks to the completely baseless Russiagate accusations. Independent reporters covering events in any country aggressively targeted by Western governments, from China and Russia to Venezuela and Nicaragua, to Syria and Iran, 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.
In every case, Western reporting systematically misrepresents specific incidents and issues so as to promote whatever demented false belief the Western ruling classes need to justify their sadistic hypocritical aggression against the countries, political movements, or even individuals like Julian Assange or Alex Saab and many 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.
This inability of Western reporting to cover events in good faith derives from the irrational belief that the world revolves around North America and Western Europe, very similar to the medieval belief that the Sun revolves around the Earth. The endlessly repeated pattern of aggression and falsehood perpetrated by the US and its allies, depends on outright censorship and systematic vilification of reporters contradicting the false accounts of information outlets supporting and justifying, either overtly or implicitly, Western ruling class aggression. That context renders indispensable independent reporting of first-hand testimony that can be corroborated either by means of documentation or separate reporting sources.
This also has to do with the fundamental ability or capacity to be able to evaluate, appreciate and understand competing rationalities. The moral philosopher Alsadair Macintyre wrote about this in his 1987 book “Whose Justice? Whose rationality?” In his closing remarks he wrote, “...the only rational way for the adherents of any tradition to apporach intellectually, culturally and linguistically alien rivals is one that allows that in one or more areas the other may be rationally superior to it in respect precisely of that in the alien tradition which it cannot as yet comprehend”. Perhaps the imminent strategic defeat the West is about to suffer in Ukraine will finally and categorically expose the West's criminal dementia.
*This article is based on a series of brief videos discussing the issue of reporting from early 2022:-
https://rumble.com/v145lch-reporting-now.html
https://rumble.com/v14nhtb-false-beliefs-censorship-and-solidarity.html
https://rumble.com/v15v92r-from-korea-to-ukraine-psy-warfare-false-beliefs-false-memories.html
https://rumble.com/v17i013-false-beliefs-and-good-faith-reporting.html
https://rumble.com/v1b0y0j-reporting-and-rationality.html
https://rumble.com/v1c4wlr-reporting-and-rationality-in-a-polarized-world.html