Media misreporting in the thirties and today

Press and media reform
Announce it now, campaign for a Free Press and a level playing field, democracy is the least worst option but has to be defended
Reform voting system, campaign finance and give Electoral Commission powers to intervene and prosecute parties who abuse process

What the left has learnt about the complicity of the press in promoting approved narratives makes me wonder why so many people are willing to accept these around the threat of Covid-19 and the measures taken to contain it, wherein the latter quite clearly outweigh the former in terms of human cost, certainly over the longer term but probably also right now. In this case the difference is maybe that we’ve been duped into pseudo-protest about adequate PPE and testing of NHS workers when the real question is which of the abundance of measures described by the umbrella term lockdown are actually effective, and which only or predominantly cause harm. Hopes of reforming the media or anything else will amount to nothing if we can’t resist this relentless imposition of fear and recover our ability to think critically. The controversy over the war in Iraq is instructive: a whole soap opera about whether there were weapons of mass destruction that would justify the invasion, when surely the important question was: if we can have them, why can’t they? Outcome: millions killed and displaced, havoc across an entire region, and still no end in sight.

Gareth Jones decried the likes of foolish socialists such as George Bernard Shaw and Sydney and Beatrice Webb who allowed themselves to “lead by the nose”, conned by their hosts into thinking the 1930’s USSR was a paradise. Jones was an honest liberal who went out of his way to find the truth, not to see what he wanted to see, or what others wanted him to. What shocks today is the number of people on the left still willing too give China the benefit of the doubt, as if there was something remotely socialist about the country worthy of defence. Wake up! Any hope of socialism died in the Cultural Revolution. In fact China, in any traditional, civilised sense, died in the Cultural Revolution. What is left is an aberration of a nation. If you want to know what China could and should have been like today, had it had a more ‘natural’ historical experience, go to Taiwan. There, Chinese, confucian civilisation continued, and continues, untraumatised by the insanity of that perverted warlord Mao Zedong. Had Chiang, and not Mao, triumphed in 1949, China would today no doubt be a civilised and sane member of the human family of nations. Instead we have a quarter of the world’s population cynically brainwashed for 70 years, and brainwashed with a frightening success almost beyond belief; 2 nations, Tibet and East Turkestan/ Xinjiang destroyed by a ruthless cultural genocide and, running the whole show, a fascistic state machine whose national impetus is fired largely by a desire for revenge for its 19/20 century humiliation by Japan and the West. My UK secondary school history books had one short, undetailed paragraph about the Opium Wars; in China, children spend at least a year of their history syllabus studying this period. We drained China’s coffers of silver by selling them top notch Bengal opium, and then hung signs on the parks saying ‘ No dogs or Chinese allowed’. We have forgotten; they have not. They are now draining our coffers by selling us bottom notch plastic that doesn’t even get you high. And soon China will be buying up all our Covid bankrupt businesses at knock down prices. Yes, they will. They say that revenge is a dish best served cold. Anyone out there know if there’s a gazpacho version of Bat Soup? Hong Kong young have so accurately renamed ‘China’ as ‘Chinazi’. It is so much its true name now we should all be using it instead of the misleading ‘China’. China is not China anymore. It may be at a different stage on its journey of racist crime, but make absolutely no mistake there is very little difference between Hitler’s Germany and Xi’s China today. There already over a million totally innocent Uighurs in concentration camps, many of them being used as slave labour, producing goods sold in the West. China’s holocaust is just beginning. And in the long run, we may find that Xi’s brainwashed nation, unchecked, causes far more horror than defeated Hitler’s. When climate change really hits the fan, don’t be surprised to find the Chinese the last ones standing. China’s entire national programme is, and always have been, very long term and is underpinned by an awareness of that potential scenario. Watch out world. That’s the opinion I’ve formed having spent 5 long years of my life there, with fluent Mandarin to boot. And lastly, for almighty Hendrix’s sake, do not let Huawei (aka the Chinese government) anywhere remotely near our infrastructure! That would be just insane…

It should be noted that, although Jones was clearly motivated by a humanitarian desire to investigate the famine in Ukraine, his ability to do so was facilitated by the German diplomatic corps in the USSR. It was only through an invitation by the consulate in Kharkiv that he was allowed to avoid the then ban on foreign journalists leaving Moscow. Why were they so keen to help a foreign journalist? Was Germany’s interest in exposing the famine really as humanitarian as Jones’? Or did they have ulterior motives? The concept of lebensraum long preceded the Nazis and would have been familiar to non-Nazi diplomats, as some of those still in place in Ukraine were. It was central to Hitler’s plans and, as Tim Snyder pointed out in his 2017 Bundestag speech… “The purpose of the Second World War, from Hitler’s point of view, was the conquest of Ukraine”. The ideological basis for this was that today’s Ukraine had once been ‘Oium’, home to the Ostrogoths, before they were displaced by Slavs. The taking of Ukraine would therefore be justified as historical restoration and Hitler’s plans to do so, as alluded to in Mein Kampf, long preceded 1933. By its invitation to a British journalist, was the consulate in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s then capital, helping prepare the ground of popular opinion for what would come almost a decade later? Were they preparing Germany’s pretext? The grimmest evidence of starvation that Jones came across was not what he witnessed on his walk through the Ukrainian countryside, but in the form of letters from German Mennonite colonists in the Ukraine. These came into his possession from German sources in the May, following his March 1933 expose, on a return trip to Danzig. One of the letters states… “Seeing as we are in a terrible situation and cannot expect any help from anyone, we are forced to turn to Germany to seek assistance for us”. And, just as they mobilized to assist ‘distressed’ Germans in the Sudetanland, sure enough, 8 years later, German assistance did arrive in Ukraine (arriving to a population so brutalized by famine and death that they remained largely indifferent to Nazi atrocities such as the mass execution of Jews in Babi Yar). Gareth Jones was of course absolutely right to expose the Soviet famine despite any unintended consequences, and Walter Duranty and others wrong to deny it. But when we single out Walter Duranty for criticism we should, as we can see from the legions of British journalists who knowingly colluded in the smearing of Corbyn, recognise that his malevolent spirit, shamefully, lives on in pretty much every newspaper in the UK. The British press should also be picked up for largely failing to recognise the film Mr Jones as a Ukrainian propaganda piece which, whilst claiming to be a true story, sacrifices the true story of Gareth Jones in the interests of its spat with Russia. Were they perhaps dazzled into sloppy reporting by the rare brilliance of such an honest journalist?

Reading the first piece by ‘Phil’ above, the obvious question for me is why this has been allowed to appear on the JVL website. It reminds me of the Mail or Torygraph at their most vicious, or maybe of one of the more rabid US publications or websites.
There are plenty of things wrong with Xi’s China which need to be exposed and debated by those of us on the Left. What we don’t need are racist generalisations about ‘a brainwashed population’, nor puff pieces for an imagined alternative China under the leadership of the benevolent Chiang Kai Shek and his cabal of landlords and generals.
Hysteria about a ‘brainwashed population ‘ is reminiscent of the more fevered offerings of the political Right about the Soviet Union during the worst period of the Cold War. The effect, and in many cases the intentions, of such diatribes, were to provide a rationale for increased armament spending, to the great benefit and profitability of arms-manufacturing companies. Much of the bile currently directed at China, especially in the USA, has the same effect and intention. We don’t need this latest version of Yellow Peril paranoia (the fiendish Chinese, and their ambitions for world conquest) on this site, I’d have thought.