Stephen Sefton, January 12th 2022
In other videos I've argued that in North America and Europe especially, reporting of all kinds has become debased and corrupted in order to serve the endless psychological warfare of Western ruling elites waged both to control their own peoples domestically and also against any peoples and movements resisting their power and control overseas. And part of that argument is that journalism has really been just one more of what the French writer Paul Valery termed necessary fictions for society to operate. In this case fictions deployed by the Western elites to decorate and dissemble the essential fascism of their capitalist system marrying corporate and political power but dissembled as representative democracy.
And thus reporting of all kinds including the traditional category of journalism has become over the last thirty years ever more clearly a battleground for class warfare over control of contemporary narratives and of the historical record. And this is why I argue that the clear purpose of the debased forms of reporting prevalent in North America and Europe, very much including the elaborate propaganda apparatus that many people hold in regard as conventional journalism, is to create and deploy false beliefs that eventually become false memories, for the purposes of class warfare such that the historical record becomes as the Argentinian writer Rodolfo Walsh put it, just one more product wholly owned by the ruling elites.
However, while in domestic class terms Western elites currently enjoy practically complete success in suppressing dissent, in international class terms, in terms of their permanent war on the majority world, they have been losing the battle over narratives and history over the last twenty years or so, simply because people who have suffered imperialist aggression do not forget. They remember. And we can see this in the West's failure to subjugate Cuba, Iran or Venezuela or North Korea or even tiny Nicaragua, among many other examples, let alone their failure to co-opt as they would have liked to, the Russian Federation or the People's Republic of China.
In earlier videos, I've argued that the West's fundamental failing has been an inability to engage effectively with competing rationalities. Many people have commented on this issue from different points of view. For my part, I identify a Western imperialist rationality still believing the world revolves around its concerns and interests and thus incapable of genuine engagement. Now, however, that dead-end zombie-like rationality has to compete with a broad majority world rationality, determined to meet the needs of the their own peoples and to break free of the dead hand choke hold of the West's feudal-minded imperialist elites on their options for development.
Self-evidently these competing rationalities have many components. Others may disagree with my own specific appraisal of those components but for what it's worth I view the imperialist rationality as one operating at a decided disdavantage in contemporary circumstances in practically every sense against its rival majority world rationality. The rationality of the imperialist West and its global allies is characterized by counter-productive greed, self-serving false beliefs, a focus on corporate profit, racist marginalization derived from white supremacy, Western dominated alliances, regional collaboration of capital for the enrichment of Western and regional elites, speculative opportunism, socio-economic inequality, all fostering neocolonial dependence and supported by aggressive militarism.
By contrast the majority world rationality is typically characterized by cooperative goodwill, a strong focus on reality and the real needs of the human person, on inclusive processes of emancipation, a commitment to multipolarity, advocacy of the regional integration of peoples and the promotion of national wealth creation via productive investment and socio-economic democratization all combined with very determined emphasis on sovereign independence and a resolute commitment to military self-defense.
Perhaps in another video it'll be possible to look at the spectrum of countries deployed between these two poles and how that spectrum may change given the imminent strategic defeat facing the United States and its allies over the next year or so as they vainly attempt to impose their demented rationality against the majority world led by China and Russia.