The concept of public diplomacy can be said to be the brainchild of US broadcaster Ed Murray, when, in the 1960s, he was Director of the United States Information Agency and ran the anti-communist Voice of America. The Soviet Union had a rival voice. That said, the Anglo-American media has dominated the dissemination of news through radio, television, newspapers and news agencies across continents for as long as most people can remember. The received narrative of historical truth and current affairs reality was oriented towards the West. Heavily so. This monopoly is now being effectively challenged by RT, at birth Russia Today. The Russian international news channel, set up in 2005, has made astonishing strides in the decade and more since its establishment. It broadcasts in English, French, Spanish and Arabic and thus has its principal linguistic bases well covered. More than the bald viewing statistics, nothing illustrates its success in challenging the Anglo-American news monopoly than the inter incontinent hysteria that the mention of RT evokes in the American and British establishments and mainstream media.
RT is accused of by the heads of the CIA and FBI of undermining American democracy and values, a charge apoplectically repeated by Senators John McCaine and Lindsay Graham and others on Capitol Hill, dutifully repeated by senior British ministers and intoned in the echo chamber of the European Parliament in Brussels.
In a superbly informative and analytical article in the April issue of Le Monde diplomatique, French researcher and media specialist Maxime Audinet traces the ascent of RT to global eminence. Its motto ‘Question more’ is borrowed from the iconic American talk show host Larry King, once of CNN stable, now a twice weekly RT voice. His guests are exclusively American, civilized and sober dissenters who consider it a privilege to be interviewed by him. Max Keiser’s Keiser Report attracts considerable attention, as does as Peter Levell’s Cross Talk. Keiser’s scorching analysis of the American and global economic scene is riveting, as is Levell’s panel discussion of American politics and its global impact is no less so.
In this hall of mirrors much of the past is reflected in the American present. Witch hunts, such as the McCarthy inquisition, way back in the early 1950s comes bubbling to the surface in some shape or form, from time to time. Foreign leader. who question American policies are mercilessly pilloried. The French were denounced as ‘cheese eating monkeys’ because President Jacque Chirac cast doubt on US policy in Iraq.
Further back in time, Charlie Chaplin, the greatest comic genius in world cinema was hounded out of America for alleged subversion, and the eminent British philosopher denied entry to the country, a decision about which the American-born poet T.S. Eliot said he felt deeply ashamed.
Foreign wars, regime change, the funding of death squads in Central America have been, and still are, the hall marks of the American footprint across the globe, from Iran to Indonesia, Chile to Brazil. Maxime Audinet highlights the focus that subjects like the murderous conflict in Yemen receives on RT, which the Western mainstream media ignores or downplays. This is understandable since Saudi Arabia, the principal external force in Yemen is armed to the teeth with a cornucopia of modern weaponry by the United States, the United Kingdom, Spain and others of the Western fraternity. When the Hindu US Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard questioned the veracity of her country’s official narrative on Syria following a visit to Damascus and other places to see things for herself, she was roundly abused and physically threatened.
The United States cannot be judged solely on the excellence of its great educational institutions, Harvard, Yale, MIT, Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon et al, its innovative science and technology, but also by its racial injustice – the Ku Klux Klan ritually indulged in the murder of black citizens for decades, and still message racial hate and white supremacist doctrines. The remnants of American Indian communities await extinction in reservations. Inner city violence and the frequency of hate crimes point not to the American dream but to the American nightmare. Making a scapegoat of RT ensures no escape from this dark and forbidding tunnel.
Blistering irony of the Korean crisis
President Trump champing at bit has stated that America’s ‘strategic patience’ with North Korea is well nigh exhausted, and that all options are on the table. Trump said ‘an armada’ had been to dispatched to the waters off the Korean peninsula, but the armada ended up in Australia! Were the navigation charts to blame, or did the US President decide to calm the situation instead of inflaming it further?The Pyongyang regime is proving stubbornly defiant to such threats and warns of its capability to cause serious damage to US allies South Korea and Japan. China, meanwhile, has discovered that its influence over the regime to the north is not as telling, as the international community assumed, or as Beijing hoped, forlornly, was the case. Desperate Chinese appeals for calm are to to welcomed. President has acknowledged the sympathy and help received from Beijing, but he desires more of the same. And urgently. North Korea appears impervious to such appeals, placing its principal ally, China in a quandary.
The irony is of China’s making. China constructed an elaborate web of deceit: by supplying its ‘all-weather friend’ Pakistan with nuclear weapon technology, starting with a readymade bomb in May 1990, by which it hoped to contain India within the ambit of the Subcontinent. Pakistan would provide North Korea with nuclear weapon technology and receive in return the missile technology it had been gifted by China. The proliferation racket was masterminded on the ground by Pakistan’s rogue scientist A.Q. Khan, who purloined centrifuge technology from a Dutch facilty. His arrest in Holland was baulked by President Ronald Reagan, whose Administration was hell-bent on arming the jihadi Mujahideen proxy in Afghanistan against the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul and its handler in Moscow.
The head of the CIA’s Pakistan desk, Richard Barlow, kept alerting his superiors on this illicit commerce but was rebuffed. When Barlow persisted, he was suspended and sacked on the ground that he was stricken by mental illness. The story was told by journalists Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark in their massive tome, Deception: Pakistan, the United States and the Global Nuclear Weapons Conspiracy.
The American journalist Andrew Small following six years of meticulous research published The China-Pakistan Axis: Asia’s New Geopolitics, in which he reveals the origins of the Sino-Pakistan clandestine nuclear weapons project and its fundamental anti-Indian goal. ‘Pakistan is China’s Israel,’ said China’s General Xiong Guanghai. Small sums up the China’s predicament: ‘Beijing can count its reliable friends on the fingers of one hand. The North Koreans have proved to be truculent and resentful, and are a standing risk to Chinese strategic interests in North East Asia…affinities in a common cause in resisting Western hegemony have not yet eradicated the deep-seated mutual suspicion in the Russia-China relationship. From Iran to Sudan, Zimbabwe to Laos and Cambodia, so many of China’s supposedly close relationships are fragile, reversible and overly contingent on continuation in power of a specific regime. Pakistan is the only friendship that has been tested out over decades, commands deep support from across the political spectrum and institutions of state…’
China’s Pakistani bred nuclear chickens are coming home to roost in North Korea.
Indian vaccine to combat Zika virus
The Hyderabad-based Bharat Biotech’s anti-Zika vaccine has achieved total success in animal tests. A inactivated vaccine with the virus grown in a culture and then killed using physical and chemical processes have been promising. The results of the study have been published in the Nature group journal Science Reports. Two doses of the vaccine given through the intra-muscular route on mice were found to protect them against the Zika virus. Those mice not vaccinated died with a week or so.
‘The vaccine was developed using the African strain of the virus. It is important that to prove that the received vaccine developed with the African strain also protects against Zico infection caused by the contemporary Asian strains of the Zico virus into the country was difficult, and hence the vaccine challenge studies with the Asian virus had to be outsourced to a contact research organization in the US,’ says K.Sumapathy from Bharat Biotech and author of the first paper. The vaccine has also been tested on rabbits, with similar encouraging results to those of mice.
The marketing will be a red letter day for the Indian company that produced it.
