While it publishes well written, worthwhile and even witty pieces on all manner of subjects, it’s a wonder anyone takes The Economist seriously on matters crucial to the elites which, behind a fast fading veneer of democracy, rule the West. 1 In this respect, rather like that other UK organ, The Guardian, the Economist bears out a truth I’ve several times set out as follows:
On many matters our ‘quality’ media serve us passably well but this truth facilitates a greater lie. Corporate media must show themselves trustworthy even when this may embarrass those in high office. (Not only does long term capacity to influence opinion and manufacture consent depend on this. So too, on pain of losing market share, do their business models.) But the trust so gained helps them mislead us, more by omission than commission, on matters critical – above all the vilifying of states and leaders in the way of empire designs – to the power they ultimately serve.
The systemic obligation of corporate media to project the agendas of power on matters vital to power plays out through ownership patterns, advertising and/or donor dependence, 2 and in the case of the BBC, appointees to senior posts who are reliably ‘establishment’. But this does not of itself make those media ridiculous. For that we must look to The Economist’s habit of crying wolf on such matters. I have observed before how it has for a decade and a half to my knowledge foretold the imminent collapse of China’s economy. In Britain is broken, but how to fix it? I wrote of its:
… doomsaying China’s impending crash. Why? Because Beijing won’t do as the West – with its rotting inner cities and permanent precariat, its welfare systems at death’s door while a heap of horrors whose fixing should be the alpha and omega of economics go unfixed – counsels. To the bafflement of these geniuses, Xi and his latter day mandarins won’t take their solid gold advice and hand over the beating heart of any modern economy, its banking sector, to the famously farsighted care of rentiers.
To be pedantically clear, that last sentence is sarcasm. China is sternly lectured by the West for not “opening up” its economy, and sneered at by the far left as fully capitalist. The latter, as set out here, is a profoundly mistaken view. By keeping tight control over the flow of finance, China is able not only to plan economic development far into the future but to ensure, albeit at cost of high levels of wealth inequality along the way, that society as a whole benefits.
Two sentences earlier I had written of the second greatest obstacle to empire designs. Of:
Russia’s meteoric recovery on Vladimir Putin’s watch, from the economic basket case of the Yeltsin/IMF disaster capitalism years to the world’s fourth largest economy …
… a recovery similarly ignored by an Economist fully signed up to the neoliberalism unleashed on Russia in the Boris Yeltsin years at IMF behest. 3 Here too the weekly was carried away by its own wishful thinking. Having served up slightly more grown up versions of John McCain’s “gas station with nukes” assessment of post Yeltsin Russia, it did much the same on the military front in respect of her SMO in Ukraine.
On which it joined the rest of corporate Western media in relaying two fat fibs. One being that this was a war wholly of Putin’s making, a whopper which, while crumbling under the slightest meaningful scrutiny, is seldom subjected to the stuff by outlets I have earned the right to call systemically corrupt. The other, maintained until it was no longer possible to do so by even the most ardent Russophobic outlets, being that Russia was losing.
And guess what? It’s still peddling delusionality, even with Ukraine’s illegitimate leadership 4 – and more tragically the soldiers bleeding out on the collapsing front of a war of attrition Kiev cannot win 5 – on the ropes. Why? Assuming there’s any intellectual content at all, it can only be the forlorn hope of securing Istanbul II concessions Putin could not make even if so minded.
(And why, after all the West’s betrayals – from James Baker’s “not one inch eastwards” promise to Gorbachev, through Merkel and Hollande’s gleeful boasting of having fooled him over Minsk, to Nordstream sabotage, Crocus Hall atrocity 6 and the SALT/START-wrecking 7 “Spider’s Web” strikes on Russia’s strategic bombers thirteen days before the US/IAEA backstabbing of Iran on June 13 – would he be so minded?)
My cue to hand over to Simplicius, whose post today underwrites my opening expression of wonderment at “anyone taking the Economist seriously on matters crucial to the elites which … rule the West”.
After leading with US Secretary of State Marc Rubio’s ridiculous claim that 100,000 Russian soldiers in Ukraine have died in this year alone – died, mark you, presumably on top of many times that number wounded – Simplicius goes on:
This was immediately backed up by new articles, like the following from the Economist, which likewise claims Russia is experiencing its deadliest year on the front yet, with 30,000+ deaths just in the past couple months alone:
The above is a particularly egregious example. Just take a look at their methodology, or lack thereof. This small extract constitutes the entirety of their ‘scientific’ premise for Russian losses:
There is no official tally of losses on either side. But our daily war tracker offers some clues. Our satellite data and shifts to areas of control suggest when the fighting is intensifying. This lines up well with more than 200 credible estimates of casualties from Western governments and independent researchers. By combining this data we can, for the first time, provide a credible daily death toll—or an estimate of estimates.
In short, they claim their satellite data alerts them to where fighting happens to ‘intensify’, and from that they—by some incredible leap of logic—infer that Russian forces are experiencing massive losses. The baffling part is that this facile methodology should apply to the AFU in parallel as well, yet when it comes to Ukraine’s losses, the Economist’s staff are without even a hint of curiosity:
There is too little data to generate a comparable live estimate for Ukraine. However, a catalogue of the known dead and missing from UALosses, a website, implies that between 70,000 and 140,000 Ukrainian soldiers have died since the invasion began.
Read that again: satellite data showing “intense fighting” inherently points to Russian losses merely on the assumption that any fighting, as a general rule, results in Russian but not Ukrainian losses. This is an astoundingly juvenile, biased, and to be frank, fraudulent, level of analysis.
Quite. But how many will read the Economist as critically as Simplicius does?
I continue to read, view and listen in preparation for a post or set of posts on how kinetic wars in Ukraine and Middle East, and as yet non-kinetic wars in South Asia, are interlinked in ways both intricate and dynamic. The nature of these wars – as the reckless provocations of a waning but still powerful empire refusing to accept multipolarity – is, I fear, poorly understood thanks to the likes of The Economist and the truth I opened with.
On many matters our ‘quality’ media serve us passably well but this truth facilitates a greater lie. Corporate media must show themselves trustworthy even when this may embarrass those in high office. (Not only does their long term capacity to influence opinion and manufacture consent depend on this. So too, on pain of losing market share, do their business models.) But the trust so gained helps them mislead us, more by omission than commission, on matters critical – above all the vilifying of states and leaders in the way of empire designs – to the power they ultimately serve.
* * *
- On that “fast fading veneer of democracy”, I deem the words of Chris Hedges, framed in the US context, hardly less applicable to a “collective West” vassalised by Washington. In “Let’s Stop Pretending America is a Functioning Democracy”, he wrote:
Those who wrote trade deals to profit from underemployment of U.S. workers and sweatshop labor overseas are omnipotent. The insurance and pharmaceutical industries that run healthcare for profit are omnipotent. The intelligence agencies that spy on the public are omnipotent. The courts that reinterpret laws to excuse corporate crimes are omnipotent.
Politics is a tawdry carnival act where a constant jockeying by the ruling class dominates the news. The real business of ruling is hidden, carried out by corporate lobbyists who write the legislation, banks that loot the Treasury, the war industry and an oligarchy that determines who gets elected and who does not. It is impossible to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs, the fossil fuel industry or Raytheon, no matter which party is in office.
- Here’s something I wrote more than four years ago, in Britain Decides, and have since freely recycled:
I can think of no more cogent argument for insisting that Western democracy is ninety-five percent bogus than that (a) democracy implies consent, (b) consent is meaningless if not informed, and (c) informed consent implies truly independent media. That last we do not have when [as Noam Chomsky reminds us] they are “large corporations selling privileged audiences to other corporations”.
This does not make all or even many media practitioners outright blackguards; a truth captured in a now immortalised snippet from Chomsky’s 1996 interview with Andrew Marr, then at the BBC:
Marr: How can you know I’m self-censoring?
Chomsky: I do not say you are self censoring. I’m sure you believe everything you say. But what I’m saying is that if you believed something different you would not be sitting in that chair.
Or as I say:
Journalists who know what’s good for them please editors. Editors who know what’s good for them please proprietors. Proprietors need advertisers and/or wealthy sponsors. All are affected by [ultimately power-serving] dominant ideology which they imbibe as much as they contribute to.
- For a superb account of IMF/Yeltsin disaster capitalism in the decade following Soviet collapse, see Chapters 10-11 of Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine.
- The Kiev regime is illegitimate on multiple counts, given the 2014 Maidan Coup and all that followed, but here I confine myself to noting that Zelensky’s term expired fourteen months ago. Declaring a state of emergency does not polish this turd when the Ukraine Constitution stipulates that in any interregnum the Rada speaker assumes the role.
- Misreading a war of attrition as one of territorial loss and gain is where the two wings of Western disinformation – that concerning blame, and that concerning military realities – come together. It was necessary to sell the war as a Putin land grab, but believing its own spin on the one hand, military strategists with no experience of fighting a peer adversary on the other, led the West – not least Boris Johnson at Istanbul I – to give terrible advice to Kiev and its generals.
- Given (a) constant US meddling in the Caucasus and “Stans”, (b) the West’s dismal record of weaponising jihad to further empire agendas, and (c) the presence of Tajiks (some of them Islamists, others hired muscle) at Crocus Hall on March 25 last year, few Russians doubt a CIA presence in the shadows.
- Russia’s nuclear capable bombers were on the runways in full view on June 1. While this was derided by armchair warriors as folly, Russia was adhering to SALT terms requiring that strategic capacity be open to visual and electronic surveillance.