The Narrative Is Crumbling: Five Worn-out Lies That Keep Wars AliveWhen truth threatens the narrative, they silence the messenger.
For decades, the West controlled the story. Wars were dressed in the language of freedom, invasions were sold as humanitarian missions, the public was fed noble lies wrapped in patriotism and slick media packaging. But that era is ending. As cracks split across the Western media landscape, elites are panicking—not because they’ve lost their bombs, but because they’re losing the story. And without the story, the empire falls apart. In a conversation with Belgian journalist and anti-war writer Michel Collon on Neutrality Studies, the two of us are working through the many media lies that have been the West’s relentless warmongering over the past decades. The real battle isn’t in Gaza, or Donbas, or the South China Sea—it’s in your head. It’s the fight to decide who gets to define truth, victimhood, and violence. The good news is that right now, the old storytellers are losing control. The Five Lies That Sell Every WarIt’s a playbook so tired it should insult anyone paying attention.
It’s a playbook as old as time. The tragedy for this generation is that we were brought up thinking that we left all this behind. That now we were objective, now we had access to information, now we were educated enough to recognise the various deceptions of evil empires. Well, guess what, Europe and North America. They got you—again. Only very slowly people are seeing the cracks. From fabricated tales of beheaded babies to fake chemical attacks and sniper setups in protests, the “truth” peddled by Western media is fraying under pressure from independent investigators, leaked documents, and lived reality, but the general public moves slowly, sluggishly, and certainly doesn’t like being confronted with yet another uncomfortable truth—that we are all complicit in warcrimes. Once again. When the Left Becomes the War DepartmentEspecially the silence of the so-called progressive West is horrible. Once, there were marches in the millions against war. Today, the anti-war movement has been all but erased, or worse, co-opted, especially when it comes to the Russo-Ukrainian War and the rearmament frenzy in Europe. Parties that once stood for peace now rally behind military budgets and weapons exports, so long as the bombs fly under a liberal flag. The problem isn’t just the right wing. It’s the intellectual left that folded into the war machine, repeating imperial talking points in the name of democracy. And the dissenters? Crushed. Julian Assange was rotting in a prison cell for 10 years for exposing US war crimes through WikiLeaks; Edward Snowden is in exile for revealing illegal mass surveillance by the National Security Agency (NSA). New voices are silenced, like media outlet red., whose founder is now under EU sanctions. The goal is clear: kill the anti-war movement before it can rise again. Only outside of the Western media bubble there is sufficient public opposition against these travesties. In Latin America, in Africa, in much of Asia, people no longer trust the “international community” that only shows up with sanctions or soldiers. They know the pattern. They’ve lived it. And they can see through the hypocrisy. Truth Is Rising Where Bombs Once FellThe empire won’t crumble because it runs out of weapons. It will only fall once it runs out of believers. More and more people must understand that you can’t build peace on double standards. You can’t condemn one occupation while funding another. You can’t defend democracy by crushing dissent. Only once the hypocrisy becomes clear to a large majority in the West can we bring this war machine to a standstill by starving it of all and any funding. Michel Collon is a visionary and a realist, because he understands that the fundamentals of a better world aren’t even that complicated, only the implementation is: Build a people’s media. One that’s rooted in truth, not talking points. That brings voices from the Global South into the conversation. That exposes the machinery behind every war pitch and media blackout. That translates, educates, and connects. This is where we somehow need to go.
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2025 Pascal Lottaz |
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