WHEN Noam Chomsky observed that the United States had invaded South Vietnam he was upending the 1960s’ most pervasive case of groupthink — that the US was in Vietnam to defend the South from communists in the North.

However, the young professor was emphatically right and, by the end of the war in 1975, two-thirds of US bombs had fallen on the South.

Similarly, when Indonesia invaded East Timor in 1975, Chomsky cut a lonely figure by observing that the attack had even happened.

Enforced famine, mass bombing and executions claimed 200,000 lives but US reporting actually dropped after the invasion and flat-lined as the atrocities peaked.

A 1996 Canadian documentary told the story 20 years later but was bought, shown once, and then buried by a public service broadcaster.

In peer-reviewed studies about Western media, myself and colleagues have observed that the crimes of the West’s enemies remain portrayed very differently from those of its allies. 

Our work shows how Venezuela has been demonised as a “socialist dictatorship” since the 1998 presidential election of Hugo Chavez.

Following a 2002 coup, the New York Times, for example, endorsed a short-lived US-backed dictatorship as a “refreshing manifestation of democracy.”  

Under Donald Trump, the US blocked the importation of insulin, dialysis machines, cancer and HIV medication, including those Venezuela had already paid for.

As a specific result of the sanctions, 40,000 Venezuelans died between August 2017 and December 2018 alone. 

None of this information has appeared in any mainstream national publication in the US or Britain, except once in the Independent.

In 2011, in Libya, conflict between its government and opposition groups erupted on February 15, prompting Nato to invade.

Our news media depicted the actions of the Libyan government as indiscriminate crimes, ordered by the highest levels of government.

However, a detailed House of Commons report later clarified that the Libyan security forces had not indiscriminately targeted protesters after all.

On Iraq, at least the cameras were rolling when the 2003 invasion began.

Where were those great Western pens and lenses in the preceding decade, when sanctions led to an apparent explosion in child deaths?

Back then, Iraq was strangled by a committee who, in its alleged effort to contain that mighty Iraqi threat, quietly prevented the import of everything from heart medication to sanitary towels, shrouds to teddy bears. Who knew?

So, to the present. A key Western ally, Saudi Arabia, has been engaged since 2015 in a war against the people of Yemen, which quickly became the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. 

Since Riyadh was shown to have murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi, the news has actually started to cover Britain’s arms exports to Saudi Arabia. 

However, a recent investigation found no articles mentioning Britain’s role in supporting the “safe storage and issue of weapons,” for Saudi aircraft, as the government revealed in parliament in 2018.  

British support to Saudi Arabia involves about 7,000 employees of arms firms, civil servants and seconded military personnel. 

A former MoD official and defence attaché said: “The Saudi bosses absolutely depend on BAE Systems … They couldn’t do it without us.”

The media is complicit in state atrocities. And it happens all the time.

In fact, it just did.

Addendum:  What Actually Happened to This Article?

I did not expect a warm reception from the media when I pitched the full version of this article, specifying what it collectively failed to mention about Western foreign policy. 

My emails were ignored by almost every publication you can think of.

However, as fate would have it, one well-established liberal publication was keen and worked with me closely over a period of several weeks to create a version of this piece that everyone involved thought was exceptionally well done.

The team of media scholars I was working with was thrilled. Its editor even deployed an unusually stark headline:

“How Western media amplifies and rationalises state-sanctioned war and violence — while millions die.”

Our article was due to be published on a Thursday morning in April 2019 but the executive editor intervened as a final check.

An hour later I was called by the first editor to say there was a problem and delay.

When the drafted article came back to us, the phrase “While millions die” had been removed.

All references to East Timor, Indonesia and Venezuela had been removed. In fact, our references to Chomsky, Herman, Vietnam, and even our own status as scholars of propaganda had been removed.

Our paragraph on Nato/Libya was annotated with: “Needs line in here about nature of Gaddafi regime. Can’t ignore its atrocities.” 

In response, we observed that mainstream evidence made it clear it was our “rebels” in Libya who conducted large-scale human rights abuses against black Africans.

Furthermore, the Nato intervention magnified the death toll in Libya by at least seven times, according to a study in a high-ranking journal International Security.

The House of Commons foreign affairs committee stated: “Despite his rhetoric, the proposition that […] Gaddafi would have ordered the massacre of civilians in Benghazi was not supported by the available evidence.

“The Gaddafi regime had retaken towns from the rebels without attacking civilians in early February 2011. […]

“The disparity between male and female casualties suggested that Gaddafi regime forces targeted male combatants in a civil war and did not indiscriminately attack civilians.

“More widely, Muammar Gaddafi’s 40-year record of appalling human rights abuses did not include large-scale attacks on Libyan civilians.”

The same patterns are repeated time and again, right up to the present — and it is easier than ever for journalists to document. 

In my case, I maintained weekly contact with our publication for over a month before they told me to let it go.  

This is not censorship — it is just editorial choices consistently made in favour of established power systems, over-riding all other considerations, just as Chomsky always said.

But millions do die. And these are avoidable deaths caused by powerful individuals and institutions in the West through the predictable consequences of economic and military warfare.

None of this is even to touch on the long-trailing bloodstains left in the wake of certain bloated and coddled industries operating from our shores — notably tobacco, mining, and armaments, or the grossly disproportionate effect that Western military-industrial complexes have on pollution and global warming, or what fresh hell might be unleashed at any minute over Iran or even China and Russia.