Fabrication of Fact: Western Media Narratives (Part 1)
Western media corporations often tout themselves as factual or unbiased. Speaking the truth, reporting on reality, not attempting to push a narrative. Bias affects every media company, regardless of which country they are in, be it Vietnam or Zimbabwe. We have companies such as Ground News profiting off of the idea that the truth is somewhere in the middle between these sources’ biases. The accusations are often made of sensationalized stories, hyperbolic retellings of events, hyperfocus on trivial subjects to ignore larger ones. The media in the West is guilty of all of it. Of pushing the Overton Window further right each passing day, of providing an unbalanced look at the world. Reporting on stories that benefit politicians and political agendas instead of the facts. Crimes in their own rights, most communists will agree. The most important question never gets asked though. What happens when a story is fabricated and the media treats it as fact?
In this three part series, I hope to deconstruct with you three stories from various points in history that rely on a completely fabricated story that gets taken as fact, and the implications this has on the world around us. From promoting misinformation and conspiracy theories, to what-aboutisms, to condemnations of the furry community, we will see what happens when profit drives news, not truth. When news corporations wish to push a political narrative, regardless of how true it might be.
Many in our audience might have seen a YouTube video by the creator Hakim where he deconstructs the narrative of the events in Tiananmen Square in 1989. The Western narrative goes something like this: 1. Students became dissatisfied with the current abusive regime in power in China and wanted democratic reform; 2. Students and other citizen groups began to convene on Tiananmen Square in a mass protest; 3. The Chinese government, being afraid of the protesters, demanded they vacate the square; and finally 4. When the protesters didn’t vacate the square, the Chinese Military was sent in and massacred many student protesters. However, each step in that narrative is fundamentally flawed. Each deserves their own newsletter someday, but for now we will address the basics. For part 1, students were protesting the living conditions of Chinese students and a supposed regime change peddled by a foreign government (namely, the US). It largely was unfortunately a classist march where students and intellectuals actively prohibited workers from joining, and were led largely by pro-Western and pro-US actors. Some of the leaders of these protests actively advocated for Western colonization of China, and post-culturalist policies to erase Chinese culture and replace it with something like the US à la Hong Kong. As for point 2, the demonstrations were never intended to be peaceful marches, and set out with the explicit goal of occupying the Party Headquarters. As they gathered, they displayed symbols of Western imperialism up to and including a recreation of the Statue of Liberty. When protesters began to become violent, the Chinese government declared martial law in Beijing and stationed troops outside of the city. And finally, clashes between these troops and citizens happened but not in the Square, and nowhere near the scale reported in the West. Please watch Hakim’s full video linked below in the sources if you need a more detailed breakdown.
For today however, what does this mean that this false narrative of Chinese governmental oppression against pro-democracy protesters is taken as fact? It allows the West to paint a narrative that left-leaning countries like China are innately oppressive. It creates the guise that the remaining leftist countries are tyrannical, and the US and West is safe. Its factual basis is taken for granted, and it is used by parties all across the West as an example to dispel the idea of a peaceful leftist state. In a communist country, your rights are non-existent, and if you fight for them, then you will be run over by tanks. In the West, you might be starving to death because your job doesn’t pay you enough to buy groceries, and the fascist regime just slashed food-aid programs, but at least you’re free. Criticisms of the falseness of this narrative also often create backlash from Western Historians who listen to false narratives by pro-US organizations, ignore primary sources, and often pretend as if the Chinese Government did not admit that violence did occur and actively “hides the truth.”
Media narratives like this provide an ample what-aboutism for anti-worker political parties to ignore actual issues in their societies, and promote the false idea that things like that don’t occur in the West. For example, the infamous Philadelphia bombings perpetrated by police or the recent Los Angeles protests where police indiscriminately firing less-than-lethal ammunition at reporters on live television.
Propaganda is everywhere, in capitalist, fascist, and communist countries. However, propaganda that is taught in schools as fact, that is reported on consistently over three decades later, and is still used as a supposed example of the inherent tyrannical nature of communism only serves to benefit the classes in power and undermine class struggles.
In Solidarity,
FurInform
