The flames that engulfed Kathmandu not only reduced the institutions of the Nepalese state to ashes, they also fueled the romanticized imagination of the Western press.
The overthrow of Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli by arson mobs has been glorified, while former Supreme Court Justice Sushila Karki, wrongly promoted to the rank of “crusader,” now leads an interim government lacking legitimacy. This media romanticization, already observed in 2024 in Bangladesh with Sheikh Hasina, reveals a deeply asymmetrical logic of representation, where anarchy is confused with democracy and chaos becomes, in the Western eye, the scene of a supposed popular emancipation. If the Indonesian government were to fall, the unrest that has shaken the country for several weeks could well be reclassified by the media as a new “popular revolution.”
Western media romanticization: chaos disguised as democracy
Without a shadow of a doubt, the example of Nepal illustrates a constant: Western media transform scenes of destruction, looting, and lynching (at least three police officers) into fictionalized accounts of a “popular revolution.” This narrative process, both selective and biased, consists of disguising nihilistic violence as democratic effervescence. Thus, the bloody riots in Kathmandu—which left the Parliament, the Supreme Court, and hundreds of institutions in ruins—were glorified as a “student uprising against corruption.” But behind this facade, the reality is quite different: a fractured society, a deinstitutionalized state, and an army that ultimately regains power. This disguise is not accidental; it responds to a Western logic where the “other” is perceived as an exotic testing ground and where the suffering of peoples becomes a spectacle consumed from the editorial offices of London, Washington, or Brussels. The parallel is more astonishing than ever: when crowds set fire to symbols of the state in the West—as during the assault on the Capitol in January 2021—the media discourse denounces a fascist threat. But when the same scenario unfolds in Kathmandu, Dhaka, or Jakarta, the same media speak of a “democratic renaissance.” This dissonance reveals less a fascination with democracy than a latent contempt for the peoples of the Global South, reduced to mere extras in a geopolitical shadow play.
Double standards as a weapon of cognitive domination
What is at stake goes beyond journalistic narrative: it is the fabrication of a hierarchy of lives and norms. The Western media applies a variable-geometry scale: disorder at home is an existential threat; disorder elsewhere becomes a romantic curiosity, even “progress.” This duplicity is not only ideological; it is profoundly political. It indirectly legitimizes anarchy in fragile countries, justifies external interference, and, above all, perpetuates the narrative that non-Western societies are incapable of stable governance without supervision. The destruction of Nepalese institutions is not perceived as a national tragedy but as a thrilling episode in a democratic fiction intended for readers of the New York Times or the Guardian. By reducing instability to a simple “revolutionary moment,” the Western media, as always, obscures the real issues at stake: the collapse of the state, the weakening of sovereignty, and the creeping militarization of power. Thus, the media double standard does not just inform: it guides, it shapes, it imposes a vision where the suffering of the peoples of the Global South becomes the raw material of a globalized narrative.
In Watermark, the Nepal tragedy shows, implicitly, that this is not just a matter of journalistic bias but of a strategy of cognitive domination in which the West dictates what should be perceived as democracy, anarchy, or revolution—according to its interests.
Mohamed Lamine KABA, Expert in geopolitics of governance and regional integration, Institute of Governance, Humanities and Social Sciences, Pan-African University
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