I cannot avoid making a brief comment on The Sunday Times editorial of July 5, 2026 (“Britain can still learn from 250 years of American ideals”): for it offers an excellent specimen of the kind of newspaper propaganda which depraves our public life.
This reputable paper refers to President Trump’s “erratic and crude” use of his authority, and goes on to say that “Trump’s confused ventures in Iran and unforgivable tolerance of President Putin have exposed the limits of contemporary US foreign policy. Meanwhile, China’s continuing economic rise and brutal Russian aggression have exposed dangerous complacency about European security.”
We have all become accustomed to the employment of euphemisms to describe our own crimes, and those of our allies: the media was thoroughly discredited by its audacious misreporting of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and is, in any case, widely regarded as corrupt and dishonest. But despite what we all know of the insolence of the press, there is still something remarkable in The Sunday Times’s ability, within just a few lines, to accurately describe one war as “brutal” and falsely describe another as a set of “confused ventures”.
What were the “confused ventures” of the US administration in Iran? They consisted of a flagrant war of aggression, waged without any pretence of self-defence, and without any prior attempt to persuade the American people of the war’s justice or expediency. During the first day of this “confused” venture, over one hundred children were murdered in an American strike on a school. The savage director of this confused venture, President Trump, openly threatened genocide against the Iranian population, in full view of the world, when he said: “A whole civilisation will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will”, amid several other threats to Iran’s civilian infrastructure. The confused venture ruined countless innocent lives by inflicting death, injury, and global economic disorder.
But none of this is to be described as “brutal”, or as “aggression”, because those words, by their nature, can apply only to our enemies—Russia, in this case. It does not matter how barbarous the actions or talk of the US empire become; it does not matter if the Trump administration reaches the highest pitch of sadistic cruelty. Our press is to look on, and, when the time comes to review what has occurred, to call it a collection of “confused ventures” as though we were not all witnesses to the atrocity.
Such is the function of our media: to misinform the people in the interests of the ruling class — a class which clings to the alliance with America, and cannot bear to accept the truth about its imperial crimes. The necessary consequence of discharging this ideological duty is ever-increasing shamelessness and disgrace.
