The Narrative Is Crumbling: Five Worn-out Lies That Keep Wars Alive
When 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 War
It’s a playbook so tired it should insult anyone paying attention.
Step 1: Hide the real motives, whether it’s for natural gas, oil, minerals, or the land of the Palestinians. Say it’s about saving women or fighting terror, and your good to go.
Step 2: Erase and rewrite the past. Forget colonial borders, CIA coups, or the decades of sanctions that broke a country’s back. And please make sure that you emphasise the world started on October 7th and not a day earlier.
Step 3: Villanize the target. Whether it’s Saddam, Gaddafi, Assad, or Putin, paint them as madmen, devils, and even better, Hitler. If anyone dares to challenge you, accuse them of being modern day Nazi-lovers. All will be well.
Step 4: Flip the roles and play the victim; shift the threat to the side buried beneath rubble. Claim that every crime you commit is the outgrowth of what your victim did. Cry that not endowing you with weapons, equals pulling a Genocide on you.
And last but not least: Monopolize the microphone. Drown out dissent and block alternative viewpoints. If someone questions the war, brand them a sympathizer or a conspiracy theorist.
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 Department
Especially 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 Fell
The 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.
Yes, the formula works. It's been working for centuries. Hannibal is at the gate. The Huns are coming. But when the hypocrisy becomes clear to the majority, it’s always too late and the majority easily forgets, swallowing the next lie just as quickly. Reality only makes an impact when it bites. Eons-old human behavior is not going to change; the majority simply does not react unless things affect them directly.
And the perpetrators of these lies learn from their mistakes. Look at how, three years on, they’ve destroyed Ukraine over a million dead, millions more displaced. The war-mongers learned the lessons well: print money, send weapons. Hell, genocide is fine . just don’t let anyone come home in a body bag. That might distract the crowd from their bread and circuses.
The Five Lies That Sell Every War.... When checking these, and putting these within another context, in certain family circles and conflicts, these five lies keep the ones who miss the capacity to discuss and negotiate, to be open and fair, to behave diplomatic and able to listen as well, powerful in their warrior behaviour. When this is analysed it is so much easier to step aside, because the mask has fallen down of those who try to impress you and govern your life.