The Unsayable: Reflections on Public Discourse
A Stand and Tribute for Jacques Baud
This article is a chapter from my book Wir und der Westen (soon to be published in English as We and the West). In solidarity with Swiss analyst Jacques Baud, I have retitled it from “Things Hard to Say” to “The Unsayable”. Drafted in 2024, the chapter examines systematic distortions in Western public discourse, complementing the chapter “Unipolar, Hegemonic, Transatlantic Biases”, which analyses the background logic behind the phenomenon. The chapter includes the question: “Are we sure we should exclude Jacques Baud – a Swiss citizen and credentialed expert – from public discourse for dissenting from the official narrative?”
Throughout the West, including in Switzerland, there are things that are difficult to say. There are subjects whose utterance invites stigma and public pressure to conform. As mentioned earlier, I believe certain such mechanisms are indeed part of a healthy society. The question is whether these mechanisms are functioning correctly and for the good.
Above, I have already laid out my conviction that – as one would expect – the most comprehensive overall narrative, and thus the primary distortion of our time, has been the unipolar liberal-imperial ideology emanating from a transatlantically-centered power structure. The logical conclusion, therefore, is that voices contradicting this overall narrative risk being systematically marginalized and excluded.
The belief that this can hardly be the case is deeply ingrained in many people’s worldview. It should not be so, must not be, cannot be. But is it really not so? Could there not, in fact, be well-founded perspectives that scarcely make it into public discourse?
A first reason for suspicion is the absence of any reflection on the content of my core thesis regarding the expected distortion of our view of the world. Whether I was naive or simply not attentive enough – the idea of a unipolar-hegemonic-transatlantic bias never once crossed my path for decades. Given the factual circumstances already outlined here, this is, at the very least, surprising.
Of course, in any specific case, there may always be important countervailing facts to consider. But that this expected distortion is not even present as a clearly conceptualized notion, nor even mentioned as a possible lens through which to read the world, strikes me as profoundly astonishing. That, moreover, it has never been laid out as anything approaching a coherent body of ideas, in a contextualized and defragmented form, today makes me shudder.
Over the past decade, I have been alarmed to find that the reality of public discourse does not fall short of the expected bias in the slightest. In my own case, it took a long time and considerable effort to recognize and name this. To this day, I am struck by how difficult it was, and still is, to weave the seemingly obvious into a coherent set of ideas. Indeed, adjusting to a more realistic worldview coincides with adjusting one’s fundamental assumptions about the world and the West. This book is, not least, an attempt to reconcile decades of harbored unease into a coherent relationship between perception and truth. It is therefore necessary to survey the kinds of absences one might encounter in public discourse.
I want to start by illustrating, through a few “aha” experiences, how my worldview found itself compelled to adjust. These are examples for which, in hindsight, I can find no other explanation than a transatlantic-unipolar-hegemonic bias of worldview, coupled with a fear of entertaining ideas not conforming to it.
A first example is Venezuela, where I spent an exchange year almost 25 years ago and which has repeatedly been in the geopolitical headlines. However one assesses the undoubtedly complex situation, it is also striking here that neither at the time, nor during many years at the University of Geneva, did I ever encounter the properly articulated perspective that Venezuela faced a hegemonic-imperial counterpart in the form of the United States, which – via unilateral sanctions and direct and indirect military interventions – sought control over its natural resources.
While the debate about democracy and freedom is certainly not irrelevant, this very well-documented geopolitical reality of recent decades has always been fundamental. To omit it – and, as said, to not even mention it, thereby exempting it from the intellectual duty to refute – was a serious omission. One may weigh the facts differently, but to leave out this specific perspective, which is argumentatively valid and coherent, fact-based, and certainly relevant, is hardly justifiable. It deserves to be acknowledged and, should there be problems with it, to be refuted.
During the unipolar moment of the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s, our discourse was saturated with self-righteous assumptions according to which “we”, as societies founded on morally superior values and morally superior in reality, were entitled – or even obliged – to intervene in the world. Throughout this period, the self-image and propaganda regarding freedom, democracy, and human rights stood in tension with the reality of imperial-hegemonic policies in word and deed. The narrative of the Anglo-American and Brussels political establishments regarding foreign policy was consistently colored and distorted. Full-spectrum dominance and the containment of competitors were always key objectives. Failing to articulate this fact, while simultaneously emphasising one’s own role in relation to higher values, shaped the horizon of what could be said and thought. While many layers of criticism were possible, a more fundamental questioning of hegemony and unipolarity was extremely difficult.
A second impressive example is the shaping of Japanese public discourse regarding the American military presence in the country. As in many nations, nationalist forces in Japan also link patriotism with a desire for military-political strength. Unlike what one might expect, however, this desire is rarely accompanied by a call for independence and sovereignty.
While the former certainly exists in the political spectrum, the latter is utterly absent from permissible discourse in established circles. Military build-up and the restoration of military strength seem conceivable only within the framework of the asymmetrical alliance with the USA. Within the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (Jiminto), which negotiated the still-valid security treaty with the USA in 1953 and then 1960 after Japan’s defeat and the American occupation, and which has been in power almost continuously ever since, criticism of the American military presence seems possible only to a limited degree.
Thus, facts such as the 50,000-strong troop presence, or the fact that part of the airspace over the Tokyo metropolitan area is controlled not by Japan but by the USA, are known, but can only be discussed critically behind closed doors. The general discourse at Japanese elite universities and in English-language “international” circles is predominantly based on the assumption that it is not the USA, but China, that poses a threat. Interestingly, these premises are never explicitly argued for but are instead presupposed implicitly, almost like dogma. Anyone wishing to participate in the discourse and rise to influential positions learns that the US-Japan alliance and the US military presence are to be associated with stability and security, but not with power projection and hegemonic-imperial goals of dominance.
The parallels to Germany reveal themselves upon a moment’s reflection. The problem is that one hardly seems permitted to think them either. Extremely cautiously, over many years, I approached the idea that there might be something like American political influence in Germany. “Ram(m)stein” was known to me much earlier as a German music band than as an American military base, even in the 2000s when it functioned as a coordination point for illegal wars of aggression. Again, the astonishing thing is that I never encountered these ideas in over two decades.
While I would gladly take sole responsibility for my own naivety, much suggests – unfortunately – that it alone cannot suffice as an explanation. At some point, I realized that this unipolar-transatlantic-hegemonic tendency existed, along with the corresponding cognitive dissonance. Discussing military bases in Germany with friends caused discomfort; asking Belgian doctoral students for their assessment and awareness regarding NATO in Belgium yielded little; and a first, tentative attempt to critically address the American role in the world, broached in confidence with a good acquaintance, led to a warning admonition not to take anti-Americanism too far.
From today’s vantage point, however, it should be trivial to note the large discrepancies between the propaganda narrative and real politics. An illuminating anecdote is provided by the “artificial intelligence” module ChatGPT. When asked about the number of US troops in Japan, the module contextualizes their presence within a framework of security and stability. Upon being asked how this framing narrative aligns with the explicitly formulated doctrine of full-spectrum dominance and containment policy, the module states that this is indeed the communication narrative and that more offensive strategic goals are omitted. After asking twice more whether this meant its previous answer reflected propaganda efforts, and citing its own stated need to proactively provide and illuminate relevant context, ChatGPT concedes that its statements on the US military presence would indeed deserve a more balanced representation.
Given all these circumstances and facts, would it not be imperative to have the hypothesis of an imperial-aggressive West – or at least the Anglosphere or more precisely defined forces leading it – present in discourse as at least one possible perspective?
What one consistently finds are specific examples of criticism, for instance of American foreign policy, or of one of the American parties, or of certain forces within Western countries portrayed as extreme. This criticism, however, normally does not lead to elevating the hypothesis of an imperial-aggressive West to the starting point of analysis. The starting point remains the assumption that the West defends freedom, democracy, and human rights. The West is assumed to be the “good guys”. Even the most fundamental criticism cannot tarnish this basic assumption.
Commentators who do not share this starting point, or who even prefer the opposite hypothesis – that one should rather not assume the West to be the good guys in every new situation – find themselves contradicting our foundational mythology. Deeper criticism of this self-image is difficult for many people to bear. It would require an adjustment of important parts of their worldview. And that is difficult.
Gaining a place within the political establishment with such statements and assumptions is practically impossible. Once you recognize the pattern, however, it falls from your eyes like scales. Italy and South Korea are similarly situated – military bases, geopolitical alignment, self-portrayal and self-perception linked to freedom, democracy, and human rights, yet more or less deficient conditions in reality concerning these very values.
A third and final example I found revealing was the concept of “burden-sharing”. The term originates from a subfield of academic literature in international relations and concretely means the participation of allied countries in American military actions. During a social sciences methodology seminar in 2014, the American professor used an example from this literature concerning which allied countries had participated to what extent in which military campaigns.
After some reflection, I understood the problematic assumption packaged within this term. A “burden” is something whose bearing is connected to responsibility and is thus something positive. This, in turn, means that what is borne as a burden is moral, or at least not something morally too dubious. The burden-sharing literature has thus, without fanfare or argument, smuggled positive value judgments about its subject matter into its basic assumptions. If one lacks a sufficiently robust worldview, or has never been able to subject the implicitly present basic assumptions to a reality check, one will tend to consider these assumptions likely correct. Where, moreover, the official discourse and that in the media constantly repeat these assumptions, a worldview will solidify that is based on unconsidered, unjustified, and at minimum incomplete if not untrue foundations.
Paradoxically, societies that consider themselves free and democratic are particularly susceptible to propaganda. While, for example, everyone in China knows that a certain representation of reality from the government and the party has to be expected, containing a certain degree of truth and a certain degree of propaganda, we Swiss – for instance – are much more easily deceived. If we assume that, owing to our well-functioning democracy and free press, there are no major systematic distortions in public discourse, this expectation leaves little willingness to systematically check everything for coloring and distortion. Yet, once again, biases are to be expected. And tendencies toward biases do indeed exist. Even if it is painful to admit, it seems to me there is no way around it.
Examples of distorted worldviews are widespread. An impressive example was disseminated by the French publication Le Monde diplomatique – incidentally, one of the few publications in France with a still-independent editorial board. According to a public opinion survey conducted in France since 1945, striking results came to light regarding the question of which country contributed most to Germany’s defeat in the Second World War.
While in 1945, 57% answered the Soviet Union, compared to 20% the USA, by 2024 the situation was precisely reversed. 60% of respondents named the USA, and only 25% the Soviet Union. In this concrete case, therefore, not all wartime victors wrote the entire history, but only those who also “won” the subsequent Cold War, and who have maintained the interpretive hegemony into the unipolar moment.
The dominant narratives of our time have been transatlantic and composed in English. They reflect the power structures in the economy, society, and politics outlined earlier. Anyone wishing for an unclouded view of reality should be aware of this. We are of course surrounded by “our own” propaganda: the imperial-hegemonic-transatlantic-neoliberal propaganda, with a moralistic veneer of democracy and human rights.
Through a combination of selection, emphasis, filtering, and evaluative framing of the facts to be presented, as well as mechanisms of moral and social sanctions and threats of sanctions, this worldview monopoly has been maintained. Let us examine the Swiss case to see to what extent the unavoidable – and, as mentioned above, potentially healthy and desirable – filtering system, this gatekeeper-mechanism of the fourth estate in our society, functions convincingly. Could it be that the exclusion of certain voices does not just go awry in isolated, exceptional cases, but that this happens systematically?
If one looks for the distortions described above in Swiss publications, one finds them to be widespread and abundant. In an article published by SRF on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China, it is stated that the United States is portrayed by Xi Jinping’s government as the main actor seeking to obstruct China’s rise. The author of the article, however, leaves unaddressed the extent to which this depiction corresponds to reality, and instead clearly suggests through the framing narrative that this is a figment of imagination rather than an easily documented fact.
While it is certainly conceivable to point out a possible degree of exaggeration or disproportionate emphasis on the United States as an external factor on the part of the Chinese government, the omission of the well-documented policy of containment and the pursuit of primacy – evident both in words and in deeds – constitutes a serious lapse. Not even presenting this as a possible interpretive lens, and instead implying that such considerations are entirely far-fetched and implausible, is highly tendentious. The only remaining question is whether this omission reflects a deliberate, manipulative act of propaganda, or an unintentional misrepresentation resulting from a lack of understanding.
A further example can be found in the weekly magazine of the daily newspaper Tages-Anzeiger, in an interview with the cancer researcher and former Canton of Ticino parliamentarian Franco Cavalli. The interviewer allows himself not only to disregard the substantively argued elements of Cavalli’s views, but to treat them with open derision. At the core of the exchange lies the question of whether it is more likely that China or the United States would initiate an escalation around Taiwan.
While one may well hold the view that such intentions are more likely to be attributed to China, it is nevertheless difficult to comprehend how the thesis that the United States could also be associated with such intentions can be dismissed without argument. To refuse even to admit the hypothesis of an aggressively hegemonic West – or, more concretely, of the United States – as a legitimate object of debate stands in contradiction to any serious intellectual standard. As outlined above, it also runs counter to important, fact-based aspects of the real world. The evasive move employed in the interview – suggesting that criticism of the United States tends to be accompanied by other untenable views, and that this alone suffices to ignore the substance of the critique – is once again either the product of successful indoctrination or of fact-resistant arrogance and self-deception.
The self-righteousness with which the journalist feels entitled not even to engage with the substance of Cavalli’s anti-imperial critique, but instead to dismiss it wholesale and with condescension, is a striking example of discursive distortion in Swiss public debate. That it is possible to brush aside an argument without any referring to evidence and reason comes closer to doctrinal preaching than to rational discourse, and points to a media environment strongly shaped by transatlantic, hegemonic, and unipolar interpretive dominance.
A final example comes from a conversation between the Swiss newspaper of record, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ), and a representative of the Swiss intelligence service NDB. The journalist – who, two days after the interview in question, suggested in a commentary that Switzerland must also consider the “NATO option”, a “plan for accession” – cites as the sole example of espionage in Switzerland the Russian embassy and the Russian UN mission in Geneva. NDB head Dussey does not address this directly but mentions on more than one occasion the situation of a “hybrid war” in which we allegedly find ourselves.
The underlying tenor that a Swiss reader derives from this is one of a threat situation, for which the cause and responsibility are certainly not to be sought in the West, and for which the hypothesis of NATO and the USA not being purely “the good guys” is surely not even considered. It is subtle and not crystal clear, but the hegemonic-unipolar reality would certainly require that a neutrally reporting newspaper would also point to espionage activities by other actors. Only a failure to recognize this reality allows this narrative to be maintained in this tone.
A few generations of the unipolar moment, with the respective unrestrained transatlantic-hegemonic and neoliberal-imperial influence, seem to have produced a public discourse and a generation of elites who deem it unnecessary to uphold the claim to intellectual honesty on certain fundamental questions of societal order. Given all this, can we be certain that the mechanism of the fourth estate is functioning correctly – for instance on the major topics of recent years such as corona, Ukraine, and Gaza?
In the meantime, even Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has admitted and expressed regret that, under pressure from the US government, Facebook censored information that was true. Does it seem likely, by contrast, that Swiss media have consistently functioned as a critical counterweight? Was it appropriate that the voice of lawyer Philipp Kruse was never heard in established media circles, or that the medical doctor Thomas Binder – who was taken away by the Canton of Aargau anti-terror unit, slapped with a newly invented diagnosis of “Corona delusion”, and committed to forced psychiatry, despite his undeniable expert status – was never able to contribute his assessments to the broader public discourse? Even if their views might have contained unfounded aspects, does it truly reflect a mature discursive environment worthy of a democracy that such voices could never reach wider segments of the population?
Are we sure we should exclude Jacques Baud – a Swiss citizen and credentialed expert – from public discourse for dissenting from the official narrative? Does it speak to a functioning fourth estate, and does it align with Swiss values, that even Swiss citizens who consider themselves informed and interested are not even aware of his existence, let alone have engaged with his views, if only to counter them with potentially more compelling arguments?
If one dares to entertain the hypothesis that systematic bias is likely, much becomes more coherently explainable. An impressive example was the coverage of the Nord Stream gas pipeline sabotage in the autumn of 2022. After initial accusations in Western media that Russia was involved, the absurdity of that idea was acknowledged and no longer suggested by anyone. The only remaining hypotheses for authorship were, on the one hand, that of the USA – published by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh in February 2023 – and on the other, that of Ukraine. The most remarkable thing was not that Hersh’s hypothesis, which at the time was the only presentation with details and a high degree of internal validity, was scarcely present in the public discourse. The crucial point was that this hypothesis was not even deemed worthy of being falsified, and that it would of course – in any discourse animated by reason and openness – have had to be addressed and confronted, but it was not.
Not even the minimum was done to maintain a semi-coherent illusion of a functioning public discourse. Consequently, in the spring of 2023, there was simply no coherent way for anyone committed to logic and truth other than to adopt the hypothesis of a likely bias.
Likewise, in the days following the 7th October 2023, it was imperative to examine the circulated stories with skepticism regarding their truthfulness. Since then, the story of allegedly 40 beheaded babies has been acknowledged as untrue by mainstream media and official sources and exposed as pure fabrication and atrocity propaganda.
Confronted with this and less extreme cases, one naturally still has the option of questioning the importance of truth itself. One can argue that manipulation may be justified in certain instances. More broadly, the possibility exists to endorse the reality of our own propaganda rather than condemn it as untrue. One may find this – for reasons that would have to be named – good and right, or necessary for some other reason, even if many people, myself included, can find little to appreciate in it.
What is not possible, however, is to deny in good faith the existence of such propaganda. And what is equally impossible with any coherence is to endorse our propaganda while simultaneously pretending that we possess a model of an open and free media landscape committed to criticism and truth-seeking.
Excerpts from We and the West (and the World):
I. The West’s Emergence as a Historical Civilization
→ 1/11 The “West” Merely Relative? – Geographically Western Eurasia
→ 2/11 First Traces of the West 2500 Years Ago?
→ 3/11 Ancient Greece as a Key Reference – Not Only for the West
II. The West’s Trajectory toward Modernity
→ 4/11 Switzerland’s Emergence at the Heart of the West
→ 5/11 Western Expansion and Imperial Continuity
→ 6/11 The West in Modernity – The Measure of Almost All Things
III. The West as a Contemporary Entity
→ 7/11 The West in the Global Order
→ 8/11 Unipolar, Hegemonic, Transatlantic Biases
→ 9/11 Various Moral Souls in the West’s Breast
→ 10/11 Western Modes of Functioning – “Liberal” and “Democratic”?
→ 11/11 Barely Veiled Oligarchies? Truly Legitimate Social Order?
→ Bonus: Whither, Post-Unipolar West?