A History of Lies

"I know that after my death a pile of rubbish will be heaped on my grave, but the wind of History will sooner or later sweep it away without mercy." - Joseph Stalin

It is said that in ancient Persian culture, bad faith was the most shameful crime of which a person could stand accused. At a time when punishment was likely to involve ritual dismemberment, deception for most was unspeakable; perhaps even unthinkable.

As legend would have it, this Persian proclivity for truthfulness didn't always work to their advantage. Themistocles victory at Salamis in 480 BC is a case in point. In one of the greatest rouses in military history, the Greek general sent his trusted servant Sicinnus to the Persian king Xerxes, with a message that the Peloponnesian allied command had succumbed to infighting, and that the Athenians were planning to evacuate that very night. Xerxes took the bait and the Persian navy sailed by night into the straits of Salamis. Arriving exhausted after a long night at the oars and forced to fight at close quarters, the Persians suffered a humiliating defeat, losing 200 ships in a battle which most historians consider the turning point in the Greco-Persian wars.

Of course this account is taken from the annals of bourgeois history, which tends to be written from the winning side. The Greeks we know as progressive, freedom loving democrats, skilled in art and literature, a civilisation set apart from the arcane Persian world of magi and god-kings, where priests stood guard over knowledge and emperors treated their subjects as slaves. Who knows what we might learn from a genuine ‘peoples history’ of the period.

George Orwell wrote in 1944:

During the Spanish civil war I found myself feeling very strongly that a true history of this war never would or could be written. Accurate figures, objective accounts of what was happening, simply did not exist. And if I felt that even in 1937, when the Spanish Government was still in being, and the lies which the various Republican factions were telling about each other and about the enemy were relatively small ones, how does the case stand now? Even if Franco is overthrown, what kind of records will the future historian have to go upon? And if Franco or anyone at all resembling him remains in power, the history of the war will consist quite largely of “facts” which millions of people now living know to be lies. One of these “facts”, for instance, is that there was a considerable Russian army in Spain. There exists the most abundant evidence that there was no such army. Yet if Franco remains in power, and if Fascism in general survives, that Russian army will go into the history books and future school children will believe in it. So for practical purposes the lie will have become truth. 

Today’s dystopian universe is exactly as Orwell described it all those years ago. We are witnessing an ever widening gap between objective and falsified reality; one in which lies are propagated as truth by a “free and independent press”, and truth labeled as propaganda by "state owned media" or "bad actors"; in which "highly likely" or "probably" is considered a legitimate justification for an act of war against a sovereign state, and in which any voice of dissent is considered treasonous or dismissed as "conspiracy theory" or "fake news".

It’s not even that leveling false accusations with extreme disregard for standards of evidence and normal jurisprudence makes for a compelling argument; rather that we live in an age of mass hypnosis, of captured minds, ever gullible, ever susceptible to generational fears and racist memes and stereopypes. Apathetic to our own suffering at the hands of our oppressors, conditioned to images of violence and bloodshed, we are active viewers in a big screen snuff film, drawn into the false reality through well worn tropes such as ‘genocide’, ‘rape’, ‘dictator’, ‘regime’ and ‘chemical weapons’.

Time and time again we see the same outrageous and blatantly transparent lies trotted out to justify vulgar and shameless crimes against humanity. In 1990 we were told that 500 babies had been ripped from incubators by Saddam’s soldiers during the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Historian Michael Parenti puts the lie to this claim resolutely with a simple question. Did the Kuwaitis have a monopoly on premature babies? (What hospital, what city for that matter, has 500 active incubators?) Operation Desert Storm was a combined land, air and sea assault over a 4 day period which completely overwhelmed the Iraqi military presence in Kuwait. Iraq announced its withdrawal on February 26, but even as it began to withdraw its soldiers, the main road north from Kuwait to the southern Iraqi city of Basra was bombed from the air, killing hundreds of troops in their vehicles.

Between 1959 and 1961 the Rwandan revolution saw the transformation of a former Belgian colony ruled by a Tutsi monarchy into an independent multi-ethnic republic. During the early 1990s the US pushed a program of economic adjustments and political reforms designed to weaken the socialist government, while at the same time providing support for the Rwandan Patriotic Front, a force consisting of some 4000 Ugandan troops under the command of Major General Paul Kagame. On April 6 1994, in an act of open provocation, the RPF shot down a plane carrying Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana and Burundian President Cyprien Ntaryamira, while simultaneously launching attacks across the country killing Hutus wherever they were found. During the ensuing conflict UN peace keepers were pressured to withdraw, allowing the RPF to capture the capital Kigali. By July the RPF had gained control of the country and established a national unity government. Kagame would go on to direct the rebellion which toppled Congolese president Mobutu Sese Seko. Several million Hutu civilians were butchered in the broader conflict, even as Western multinationals were striking mineral deals with the killers. Kagame has been praised as the man who ended the slaughter, his senior commanders largely shielded from prosecution, while the whole affair has become a cause célèbre to justify Western 'humanitarian' military interventions.

In 1999 NATO partners, cynically dubbing themselves ‘the international community’, unleashed Operation Noble Anvil, a fitting name for the iron pounding which Yugoslavia would receive over 78 consecutive days, killing, starving and maiming civilians and destroying civilian infrastructure, electricity and water supplies, and factories – sucking dry the very lifeblood of the country’s economy. It was only when the US threatened to carpet bomb Belgrade and kill 500,000 people that Milosevic and his government finally agreed to cease resistance. The official reason for the aggression, according to the US State Department, was alleged Serbian atrocities in Kosovo in which 100 000 to 500 000 ethnic Albanian men were said to have been executed and buried in mass graves. Despite this figure being lowered to 10 000 in the first days of the occupation, no evidence was ever found to substantiate the claim. Milosevic was posthumously exonerated by the international criminal court, an unimportant fact not considered worthy of reporting by western corporate news media.

In 2003 we were told by the same ‘international community’ that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction which could reach Europe within 45 minutes. These and other baseless allegations concerning links to al Qaeda and 9-11 resulted in a war in which a million Iraqis were killed, 4 million refugees were created, and from which ISIS would emerge. Once again, the occupation of Iraq failed to produce any trace of these so-called weapons of mass destruction. Bush would later joke about it.

In 2011 the ‘international community’ made up more fake stories involving crimes attributed to the ‘dictator’ Muammar Qaddafi and his ‘oppressive regime’. Like Iraq and Yugoslavia before it, Libya was targeted for 'regime change', and the most prosperous country in Africa was reduced to rubble. Over the course of 8 months, 1 week and 1 day, twenty thousand Libyans were killed, while thousands more drowned in the Mediterranean trying to escape the catastrophe. Today open slave markets operate in city squares once occupied by tourists.

These are, by Nuremberg standards, war crimes, and they are by no means unique in the history of Western imperialism. The pattern is repeated year after year, generation after generation. Tell a lie, destroy a country, rinse and repeat. Time and again our leaders absolve themselves after the fact, telling us “mistakes were made”, and “we acted on false intelligence”. Credulity knows no bounds. Warmonger-in-chief Tony should-have-been-strung-up-from-a-lamp-post-years-ago Blair has been dragged up to the podium again, this time flip-flopping on the Iran nuclear deal while lobbying for military action in Syria, because 'non-intervention has consequences'.

What we are seeing is bourgeois history in the making; the world according to Tony Blair, in which the evil dictator Assad has killed more Syrians than ISIS, in which the thuggish murderer Putin launched an unprovoked attack on Ukraine; in which the madman Kim Jong Un posessing a nuclear deterrent is a crime more unspeakable than the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; in which dropping 7 million tons of bombs on Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia is passed off as defending democracy.

The hypocrisy is staggering. Capitalism cares nothing for democracy. Global capitalism seeks only to make the world safe for resource and rent extraction, preferring strongmen over elected governments and conservative theocracies over modern secular states. A strong welfare state, free healthcare and education for all, public investment in science, technology and modern infrastructure are anathema to the system of private accumulation by which the ruling class rule.

Assad’s crime is not that he dismembers children with barrel bombs or uses chemical weapons against his own people. Why would the West even care? After all these are the same people who sold Saddam chemical weapons to use against Iran, funded death squads in El Salvador and propped up Suharto and Pinochet. No, Assad’s is a far more egregious indiscretion - in refusing to bow to international bankers and oil barons he commits the ultimate act of insolence toward the ‘international community’, and therefore he must be punished. Syria must be broken into pieces. It’s not about bringing democracy. It’s not about human rights. It’s about breaking the back of a sovereign country and a proud people who refuse to be colonised.

Whether through collective amnesia or mass hallucination, somehow we seem to have lost our grip on reality. Corporate news media presents a veritable theatre of the absurd, a David Lynch-meets-Oliver Stone serial sitcom featuring Donald Trump as Hitler or JFK, and Stormy Daniels as Marilyn, with a host of supporting actors, and none of it bears any resemblance to objective truth. We've all been to this movie before. While the media obsessed over a 22 year old White House intern blowing Bill Clinton under his desk in the oval office, NATO was bombing Kosovo. And yet Clinton’s presidency will forever be remembered for the blowjob. 'The emperor has no clothes' is an adage which rings true today both literally and figuratively.

Prior to this we had Panama, Black Eagle, and Iran-contra. By 1987 the Bush-Reagan administration was so buried in scandal it should have been unelectable. This was before the internet, before 'alternate media', and long before 'fake news' had become a thing. The stories were covered in the popular press of the day, and featured in Rolling Stone and Playboy magazines. The fact that the US government was deeply involved in drug trafficking and the illegal arms trade was 'common knowledge'. In spite of all this, George H W Bush went on to beat his democratic rival Michael Dukakis 53 to 45. CIA whistleblower and author John Stockwell recalls how Bush flipped off eager reporters at the Republican National Convention, telling them “I'm not even going to answer those questions anymore - the nation doesn't care."

The scandals around illegal arms trading go back as far as one cares to read. The Carter administration armed and trained the Mujahideen in Afghanistan with Saudi money. The Reagan administration armed and trained the Nicaraguan contras with Iranian money. By 1990 the Bush-Reagan administration had approved 771 different export licenses for the sale of ‘dual use’ technology to Iraq including 'chemical warfare-agent precursors, chemical warfare-agent production facility plans and technical drawings, chemical warfare filling equipment, biological warfare-related materials, missile fabrication equipment and missile system guidance equipment'. Clinton continued to arm and train Iraqis in several failed attempts to overthrow Saddam, while elsewhere supporting brutal military dictatorships in Columbia and Indonesia, and backing Islamists against Serbs in Bosnia. Obama armed and trained al Qaeda and various rebranded ‘moderate rebels’ throughout the Syrian conflict. Trump last year sold $110 billion worth of arms to the Saudis who are fighting a genocidal proxy war against Iran in Yemen. None of this is ‘conspiracy theory’ - it's all a matter of public record. Yet the scandals are dusted off like dandruff. Anything inconsistent with the official narrative is treated as mere static in the endless media spin-cycle. Rinse and repeat.

Bourgeois history is a history of victim blaming. It presents an inverted reality wherein the coloniser brings freedom to the colonised, declaring itself a champion of human rights, liberating the oppressed masses from their merciless dictators. Plunder is branded as development and extortion as foreign aid. The illusion is maintained through a totalitarian system of social control, through media, through education and through popular culture. With the public fully committed to the lie, our feudal lords rape and pillage with fearless impunity.

Until dissent reaches a critical mass, as happened in Russia in 1917 (and China in 1945).

Up until the Great October Revolution there had been many workers rebellions, but none that succeeded in taking over and commanding state power; putting the fear of the worker into the international bourgeoisie. This resulted in Russia being immediately invaded by 14 Western countries. Not because communism was a threat to ‘democracy’. Not because it was a threat to world peace. But because it was an existential threat to the very method of exploitation and appropriation through which capitalism sustains itself – an alternative social and economic order in which land, labour and resources are controlled and deployed to provide for social needs. And it was a contagion which was threatening to sweep across Europe and the colonies.

"...in a very short time, perhaps in a year, perhaps in two, the conservative elements in this country will be looking to Germany as the bulwark against Communism in Europe. Do not let us be in a hurry to condemn Germany. We shall be welcoming Germany as our friend", reported Britain's WWI Prime Minister Lloyd George to the House of Commons on November 28 1934. The crucial context of WWII is that Chamberlain and Churchill were banking on Hitler defeating Stalin. Instead it was the Red Army which would liberate Europe from the forces of fascism, at a cost of some 27 million Russian lives.

The West fought tooth and nail to thwart the spread of communism throughout the Cold War, salvaging what it could of the Nazi apparatus in the aftermath of WWII. Operation Paperclip, a secret program of the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency, saw more than 1,600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians recruited from post-Nazi Germany and brought to the U.S. Hans Speidel, a German general during the Second World War, served as Supreme Commander of the NATO ground forces in Central Europe from 1957 to 1963, overseeing Operation Gladio, a clandestine 'stay behind' operation which continued to carry out bombings, kidnappings and assassinations in Europe up until its official extinction in 1990.

Since the end of WWII the West has sought to advance its economic interests by putting down successful revolutions across five continents and overturning elected governments in over fifty countries. Why should it surprise anyone that the same elites who helped to build Hitler's war machine in 1934 would install, literally, a Nazi regime in Kiev in 2014, for more or less the same reasons?

The destruction of Yugoslavia by NATO had nothing to do with Milosevic's crimes against the Serbs. It was a war by international oligarchs against a non-western economy which refused IMF loans. The Invasion of Iraq had nothing to do with weapons of mass destruction. It was about liquidating a client regime that had outlived its usefulness and was threatening the US petrodollar. The destruction of Libya was not to punish Qadaffi's supposed crimes against his own people, but to break the ground for the re-colonisation of Africa by removing its strongest point of defence. It should also be noted that these were not third world economies, but relatively prosperous countries with high human development indices across the board. There can be no question that the people of Serbia, Iraq, and Libya would be much better off today without 'humanitarian' intervention by the 'international community'.

'Who controls the past controls the future' 

The information war plunges the depths of absurdity in recent historiography, in which Soviets are compared to Nazis and Stalin to Hitler. “… In his lifetime Joseph Stalin murders more of his own countrymen than are killed in all of Russia’s wars combined." "Stalin was the greatest mass murderer in history." "...only now as Stalin’s secret archives are opened can his diabolical plan to crush the west be revealed...” are just a few examples from a popular 'documentary' film which claims to go beyond the numbing statistics of horror and misery to probe the soul of one of the 20th century's most reviled figures. Primary sources beg to differ. In fact, 'Stalin's secret archives' show that in the 32 year period from 1921 and 1953 the total number of death sentences handed down by Soviet courts was less than 800 000. And we are asked to compare this to the systematic extermination of 11 million Czechs, Poles, Jews, gypsies and assorted untermensch by the Nazis during WWII?

"The extraordinary testimony of Krestinsky, Bukharin, and the rest would appear to indicate that the Kremlin's fears were well justified. For it now seems that a plot existed in the beginning of November, 1936, to project a coup d'etat, with Tukhatchevsky at its head, for May of the following year." wrote US Ambassador to Moscow Joseph Davies in 1938. Stalin's 'purges' were not show trials, but the right and proper response to a coup attempt against the Soviet state by Bukharinites and Trotskyites.

Mass starvation by famine is another crime often laid at the feet of the diabolical Stalin. In 1935 American newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst published a series of articles with accompanying photographic images documenting the horrific famine of 1932-33 in Ukraine. It was later revealed that the photos were recycled images of war torn Europe after WWI and Volga famine victims of 1921-1922, and that the foreign correspondent credited with the story, a certain Thomas Walker, 'noted journalist, traveler and student of Russian affairs', was a fictional character. (Hearst is known to some as the father of 'yellow journalism' - his coverage of the Spanish-American war is considered a landmark in the history of propaganda.)

Similar efforts have been made to undermine Mao Zedong's legacy, particularly from the 1980s onward, when articles began appearing in the Western press blaming the Chinese Communist Party for the deaths of tens of millions of citizens during The Great Leap Forward. While 'Chinese sources' originally put the number of deaths at 16.5 million, historian Joseph Ball notes "these figures were released during an ideological campaign by the government of Deng Xiaoping against the legacy of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution." Despite the questionable demographic evidence, Western opponents of communism soon inflated the numbers to upward of 30 million, with some going as high as 45 million. A more charitable historian might concede that both natural disasters and the Sino-Soviet split took an enormous toll on the collectivisation of agriculture, but that overall Mao's economic strategy was hugely successful. Census data from the period shows a rapid and sustained increase in life expectancy between 1950 and 1980 - from 35 to 65 - quite an achievement under alleged conditions of systematic torture, brutality, and mass starvation.

The same accusations have been leveled against Sukarno's Indonesia, against Castro and Che, against Allende, Chavez and Maduro, always reinforcing the same essential dogma, that socialism is synonymous with oppression and poverty, while free market capitalism represents freedom and democracy. And yet here is not a single example to be shown of a socialist country which has not come under explicit attack, either through Western backed insurgency, economic warfare, or direct military aggression. China and the USSR built their socialist economies under siege conditions, yet still managed to prioritise adequate health care, education, housing and a decent standard of living for most of their people. Tiny Cuba, cut off by US embargo from economic development, leads the world in medical research, and offers subsidised food, free education and comprehensive healthcare to all its citizens. As did Libya and Iraq. It's an uncanny coincidence that countries which mandate quality education and healthcare as basic entitlements are the same countries which always seem to end up getting bombed by the West. Then again they do tend to be ruled by murderous dictators.

 "What is history, but a fable agreed upon?” - Napoleon Bonaparte. "We will go down in history either as the world's greatest statesmen or its worst villains" - Hermann Göring. "History is written by the victor" - Winston Churchill “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” George Orwell.

Just like in ancient Greece and Persia, the institutions which stand guard over knowledge today serve a common master; but it isn't we, the people. Bourgeois history is a history of lies; a book of ancient superstition whose pages are inked in the blood of the poor. Its meaning has been manipulated by the same dark forces which seek to determine our social conditions. According to Orwell's maxim, in order to command our future we must first lay claim to our past. It is only in putting to rights these false narratives that we can begin to write our own destiny.