Allan Alach – The Biggest Lie You’ve Been Told

Do you have a feeling that we’ve been mislead for decades by the western governments, including our own? That things are not what we have been, and are still being, told? That many of our political parties are still telling the same lies to mislead us?

 In that case case, watch this video “The Biggest Lie You’ve Been Told” by UK journalist Owen Jones:

This video is an introduction to a book ‘The Fall of the West – How They Really Lost It ’ that Jones has just published (details at the foot of the video).

For those of you who don’t know of Owen Jones, he is a very active voice on the left in Britain. Once a Labour Party member, he has since left the party due to his disgust over Keir Starmer (now Andy Burnham) and over Labour’s current policies.

Jones opens the video with this statement. You may be able to draw connections between this and some of our own politicians.

“This is the biggest lie you’ve ever been told. It’s a lie about why the world you’ve always known, the world you grew up in is falling apart. You’re told the West is being destroyed by migrants. They’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, by minorities. Are we talking about Muslims here? 

We are.

By people who supposedly hate our way of life. Everything that made Britain great is being destroyed by an establishment that hates Britain and hates the West.

But who closed the factories? Who crashed the banks? Who launched the wars? The people responsible would much rather you blame someone else? In fact, the politicians and billionaires shouting loudest about the fall of the West championed many of the policies that brought it about in the first place. That’s the argument of my new book, The Fall of the West, how they really lost it.’

In his research for this book, Jones travelled extensively around the world, as he says, to ‘track down the people who saw the disaster coming and who were ignored.’

He then makes another argument:

‘The decline of Western dominance doesn’t have to mean worse lives for ordinary people. Losing an empire and losing a decent future are not the same thing.’

Jones then discusses how events in Russia in the 1990s sent us a warning.

‘It’s 1994 and an American diplomat sends Washington a warning. It’s ignored with catastrophic consequences.

His name was Wayne Murray. No anti-capitalist dissident. He was chief political analyst at the US embassy in Moscow. He was there when the Soviet Union collapsed. 

Imagine what that moment was like in Washington and here in London. The Cold War was over. The West had won. Now it would remake Russia in its own image. Sell off public assets, slash the state, let private fortunes grow.

Murray traveled around Russia and he saw something very different happening. He told me how as living standards collapsed, he carried money in his pockets to give to old women begging in the street. They were starving.’

And:

‘Democracy and human rights were what the West promised, but the West’s real priority was ruthless capitalism.’

You know the story – slash government spending, remove restrictions on capitalists, sell assets off to oligarchs etc etc.  You know what happened to Russia, as it did to New Zealand, the UK, and every other country where unfettered neoliberalism was set loose.

Jones then discusses the history of US/Western intervention in places like Iraq and Afghanistan.

‘You destroyed Iraq.

That’s what an Iraqi man told me when he found out I was British, as I walked the streets of Baghdad with Iraqi journalist Kaith Abdul Ahad.

Everywhere we went, the dead looked down from street corners, walls, and shop fronts. Forget the lies about weapons of mass destruction for a moment. 

Iraq was sitting on around a tenth of the world’s proven oil reserves. Once Saddam Hussein was overthrown, Paul Bremer, the American administrator no Iraqi had elected, opened most of the economy to full foreign ownership with profits free to leave the country. 

The occupation promised them freedom while deciding without their consent who could own their economy. Iraq’s oil revenues went into an account at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. 

And in 2020, when Iraq’s parliament demanded US troops leave, Washington reportedly threatened to restrict access to that account. You could vote, but challenge American power and your own resources could be used against you.’

 

Nothing has changed given the way the Trump regime is stealing Venezuela’s oil.

Jones next turns his attention to the effects of Thatcherism on the UK.

‘Take Sheffield, where I was born, and where I went back for this book. Before Thatcher, unemployment was 4%. By 1984, the year I was born, that had risen to nearly 1 in 6 of Sheffield’s population. A local newspaper reported a Sheffield jobs massacre. 

Meanwhile, the stock exchange has reached record levels. The factories closed. The city boomed. 

Two sides of the same transformation.’

If there is one thing that really annoys me, it is the use of the stock market as an indicator of financial well-being. Trump does that all the time, as proof of the success of his administration. The same goes in New Zealand and certainly did back in the heyday of Rogernomics – there was even a nightly segment on TV news reporting on the current share price (from memory it was called the Barclay’s Index). 

The share market has no relevance to the great majority of citizens who are struggling to keep their head above the financial waters. It’s merely a way for the rich to speculate and so become even richer.

Even today, you will notice that the “ECONOMY” is all the National and ACT parties mention.

Too bad if the general public are struggling to make ends meet, that hospital care is a farce, that our public transport is crap, and so on, as long as the ‘ECONOMY’ is growing i.e., the already well off are making even more money at the expense of the rest of us.

Quality of life for all citizens and residents of New Zealand? Yeah, right.

The downside of this relentless focus on neoliberal capitalism is, of course, things can go wrong and financial crashes occur that threaten to destroy the assets of the wealthy. 

Never mind, the government will step in and use taxpayers’ money to bail them out.  

The irony here being that the wealthy use every trick they can to avoid paying tax and moan like hell when they get hit with a tax they can’t avoid. Happy to take but not happy to pay their share.

‘The system was protected by a dogma. There is no alternative. Critics could be dismissed as cranks, dinosaurs, and losers.

When wages weren’t enough, people borrowed. Banks repackaged those risky loans into supposedly safe investments and sold them around the world. 

In 2008, it all came crashing down. Then came the rescue. 

The banks got public money. 

The public got austerity. Instead of changing the system that had failed, governments made people pay to restore it.

Nowhere was this more devastating than Greece. German and French banks had lent recklessly. But when it all broke, Greeks were told they had lived beyond their means, and much of the bailout money went straight back out to those same banks. 

Greeks inherited the bill.’

New Zealand is no exception. Look at the policies of this current government. 

Who is paying the price for the money being shuffled upwards to the already rich?

You are.

‘Greece was the extreme case, but all over the west, people suffered economic and social devastation.

In Germany and Austria, I saw the political consequences. People knew something had gone badly wrong. 

The far right offered an explanation and crucially someone to blame. Your wages aren’t enough. 

Your public services are falling apart. 

But don’t look at the wealth piling up at the top. There’s no alternative to that. 

Remember, look at the migrants supposedly taking your share.’

Does that remind you of a particular populist New Zealand politician?. 

Jones then discusses the horrific situation in Palestine, which I’m sure you are familiar with, so I won’t highlight what he says.

Gaza is the latest example of western brutalism and this has consequences.

‘The writer Amos Azer called it the boomerang effect. The brutality Europe inflicted on its colonies came home as fascism. Normalize lawlessness against other people and you create habits, justifications, and instruments of repression that can be turned against your own. 

The war on terror made torture, mass surveillance, and imprisonment without trial acceptable in the name of security. Under Trump, its language and machinery were turned on migrants, protesters, and political opponents.’

Further:

‘Trumpism is both a symptom and an accelerant of western decline. It feeds on the damage done by the old order and it gives the wealthy more power while turning anger against anyone who challenges them. 

The elites who once promised us the end of history are now preparing for the end of the world, like Peter Thiel who bought a 477 acre bolt hole in New Zealand.

Luxury bunkers now come with gyms, spars, and artificial sunrises. The richest people on Earth no longer imagine preventing catastrophe.

They imagine buying their way out of it.

But no bunker can stabilize the climate, save the harvests, or recreate the society on which even a billionaire depends. That is one possible future. Safety for a privileged few, walls and violence for everybody else.’

The wealthy will look after themselves. Remember Luxon said “I’m wealthy, I’m sorted.”

‘The answer to the fall of the West is not to rebuild Western supremacy, but to rebuild society.

And that solidarity cannot stop at our borders. A decent life here cannot be built on the destruction of somebody else’s life elsewhere.’

Jones then returns to discussing the tragedy in Palestine.

He concludes:

‘Everything you’ve just heard is a fraction of what’s in the book. The interviews, the classified documents, the astonishing facts and figures, the reporting from countries I haven’t even mentioned here.’

The link is in the description. If you want to know who really broke the world you grew up in, read it  and send this to someone who’s been told to blame all the wrong people.’

I have already put in a request for the library to buy a copy – that way others can also get to read it. Suggest you do the same.

We need to look at the current election cycle in New Zealand through the lens that Jones provides. We’ve been fed, and are still being fed, the same story that he describes. 

Three of our political parties (I’m sure you can work out who they are) are still peddling the neoliberal line about austerity being needed to balance our books, even though they won’t actually do anything about the inequities in our society, and indeed have policies to make it worse. According to them,  it is the poor peoples’ fault for their situation, that all they need to do is to get off their butts and get a job. Too bad if the pay rates are so poor there is no way they can get ahead financially.

On top of that we have New Zealand First using the exact blaming the migrants line that Jones discusses.

If this lot get voted back in, we will get what we deserve for being so ignorant.

On the other hand it would help if the Labour Party would find their own spine and actually provide voters reasons to vote for them other than the old ‘we’re better than National’ line they’ve used ever since the Lange led government. 

It’s all very well trying to run a low profile campaign as Australian Labor did, but what’s the point in being so low profile you can’t be seen?

We can only hope that the combined left win a majority in the election, and that the other parties follow the example set by ACT and New Zealand First in this government, and bludgeon significant policy changes out of Labour. 

I’m not optimistic that they will succeed.