Class War - Greatest Lies of the 20th Century

By Allan L. Jason, MEdia With Conscience

Surely, every Century surely has its prominent lies, given that “history belongs to the victors, those who win the war [and] write the story” and that much of the past few centuries at least, has been about conflict and war, as has all of the 21^st Century, to date. But the 20^th Century is the one I am most familiar with and it seems to me that it was principally about Class War; a phase of the struggle to overcome the monarchies that were borne of feudal times.

The Dutch defiance of Philip of Spain in the early 17^th C, the English “Civil War” (none so rude as to call it revolution?) and the French Revolution were all momentous events of this struggle that set the stage for the 20^th C. The Russian Revolution, the two World Wars (despite all the propagandist nonsense fed to the infantile masses of colonising countries and their colonies about fighting for “God, King and Country”) and The Cold War were all violent events of contention over ideology and that ideology was the intellectual conceptualisation of Class War.

The recording and interpretation of history has been profoundly impacted by the invention of the printing press (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printing_press) in the mid-15^th C and the development of modern, electronic communications technology (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_telegraph), which began in earnest in the early 19^th C. Both of these technologies developed and proliferated rapidly due to their importance to power; the victors shape the story with the principal objective of sustaining and perpetuating their minority dominance of the majority. In this process the 20^th Century has seen a transition from the making of assertions about the nature of events after they happen to that of dominating the analysis and interpretation of them as they happen; a transition that occurred, not exclusively but most radically during WW2 with Hitler’s systematic and technological application of propaganda , an innovation of the Roman Catholic Church of three centuries before.

Today we see it in “spin”, embedded journalism and computer-generated “twitter revolutions”. We have “democracy” driving the bus with a rosy picture of the road ahead painted on the inside of the windscreen. We live in global slurry of untruths and disinformation, all of it insoluble in the truth on which a healthy human existence in harmony with our planet depends. My contention here is that the two greatest of those untruths, the quintessence of the present condition of humanity, are:

• Communism is a failed system
• The Soviet Union was defeated and with it Socialism.

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