The chap criticising RT on the Today programme declared that it was a state-sponsored national broadcaster subject to government control and which represented the views of the establishment, before pausing awkwardly for a second or two as the leaden weight of the irony filled his soul. It was, I imagine, as he glanced about him with a sinking feeling knowing where he was and who was broadcasting his opinion. Yes, of course RT and the BBC are equivalents; of course both broadcast untruths and of course both represent the view of their controlling establishment through biased production values that no-one is advised to take at face value.
And that is exactly why their news rivalry is of the greatest public benefit. With RT exposing the BBC's fake news and the BBC doing likewise to false RT stories, by flicking between them one can get an approximation of the reality.
The watershed was Aleppo and the BBC's mythical White Helmets reporting from the besieged enclave. Except they weren't there. They didn't exist. No-one there had seen them, and when the final rump of rebel fighters surrendered there was no trace of them. Either they escaped to Idlib disguised as rebel fighters - hardly the behaviour of an aid organisation - or they were never there in the first place. Despite which the BBC continued to broadcast their fake accounts of life under siege until near the end, accounts in all probability originating no further from White City than Vauxhall.
Have you heard a single mention of the White Helmets since the fall of Aleppo? It's as though the MSM has realised that the secret is out and is desperate for people to forget all the past lies.
Back at the height of the Cold War I used to tune to Radio Moscow on a short-wave valve radio receiver whose qualities I now greatly miss; the xylophone gongs of the 'Moscow Nights' station ident before the news quavered over the ether, with an impression of great distance. The Soviet news if all was well would be predictably dull; a speech from the Agriculture Convention of the 34th Plenary of the Uzhbek Soviet, mine production output gains in Novobyersk and so on. The absence of war rhetoric was, at the time, some sort of assurance that the 4 minutes had not yet arrived.
Now forty years on we're back in the same place - trying desperately to find the truth in the ground between the liars.
15 comments:
There's a reason why I've made the effort to purchase and restore a LW/MW/SW vintage valve radio Radders and, short of the skill to renovate one, might I suggest you invest in one ?....
By all accounts they are immune to EMP.
Radio Tirana was my favourite, in the 70s - they looked at the world through a very narrow and distorted lens
"The Patriotic Peasants of Northern Ireland" - that was one of theirs.
(they meant the Provos ... I am not sure Gerry Adams would have appreciated it)
I used to tune in to Radio Tirana, Peking and Moscow in the late 1960s. They were hilarious, especially the Chinese with running dogs and paper tigers. Great fun!
I love old valve sets and I used to listen at night to the broadcasts from "far away". This Christmas I was given a Bluetooth amplifier - Maxtek - from Aldi. Let me tell you how much the sonorous sound it makes reminds me of my old valve sets. U se Spotify to select my music on my Smartphone and hook it up with the Maxtek and play. Wonderful! New technology living side by side with the old. Playing Frank Sinatra, or perhaps some choral renaissance music (Tomas Tallis) is just the ticket on a cold rainy evening by the wood stove! Novocane for the soul.
In the late Fifties, I built a small short wave receiver. It was great watching the glow of the valves and waiting for everything to begin to work. As I was
doing A Level German at the time, I used to tune into the East German radio station.
A great deal of it was intensely boring but there was the exciting feeling of doing something semi-illicit. There were a number of programmes about the former Nazi affiliation of senior political figures in West Germany. I cannot recall being greatly influenced by these because we all "knew" that a brand new democratic Germany had arisen.
On a school trip to Hanover in 1958, we did notice that our German contemporaries had been schooled about the then EEC. "Our economic community will guarantee our living standard". This was just a year after the treaty of Rome.
In the early Sixties, I learned about the developing European Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) from a Director of a large Dutch firm. It seemed so potty that I asked him how on earth a common sense people like the Dutch had agreed to it.
"Little Holland is neighbour of big Germany and the Germans wanted it", was his reply. As he was very senior and I was very junior and his guest, I thought I had spoken out of turn. I also knew that he had flown with the RAF during the war, So I was quiet.
It was not until 2002 that I translated the lead papers of a German conference, entitled "European Economic Community" and - for the first time- found the basic rationale behind the CAP, set our by a Dr. Funk. He was Reichsminister for the Economy and President of the Reichsbank and the publication dated from 1942.
I also learned that Dr. Funk had been released from jail on health grounds in 1957 and had gone to Hanover where the conference organiser of 1942 was prominent in local politics. Funk quickly established himself in the academic life of Lower Saxony.
So I have long thought it likely that he influenced the school curriculum and was still promoting his European Economic Community to my German contemporaries - but in a less exalted office than heretofore.
Coincidence has a very long arm.
"trying desperately to find the truth in the ground between the liars."
There is a faction that is trying to provoke a devastating war between Russia and the West, for their own ends.
The Clintons were (are) willing collaborators so long as it pays well.
For a while they did very well out of their treachery.
In my opinion the factions divide clearly across ethnic identitarian lines. I'm sorry to say.
The lost history of the West is its struggle against incursions from the Middle East, and collusion with those invaders by another group.
Our male kin were slaughtered and female kin sold into the Brothels of the Sultans.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_To-cV94Bo
Ah Edward many thanks for filling a memory gap and allowing me to retrieve the Nazi Dr Walther Funk's wartime speech on the economic reorganisation of Europe (here at http://www4.dr-rath-foundation.org/brussels_eu/roots/06_economic_reorganization_europe.html )
"To sum up, the following must be said:
- By concluding long-term economic agreements with European countries it will be possible to assign a place for the German market in the long-term production planning of these countries, i.e. as a safe export outlets will be found to exist for German goods in European markets.
- By creating stable exchange rates a smooth working system of payments must be assured for the carrying on of trade between individual countries. In so doing we hall link up with the existing payments agreements, which will be expanded to include a greater volume of trade on the basis of stable exchange rates.
- By an exchange of experience in the field of agriculture and industry a maximum production of foodstuffs and raw materials must be our aim, and a rational economic division of labor must be achieved in Europe. By the appropriate use of all economic resources available in Europe, the living standards of European nations must be raise, and their safety in face of possible blockade measures from outside Europe must be increased.
- A stronger sense of economic community among European nations must be aroused by collaboration in all spheres of economic policy (currency, credit, production, trade, etc.). The economic consolidation of European countries should improve their bargaining position in dealings with other economic groups in the world economy. This united Europe will not submit to political and economic terms dictated to it by any extra-European body. It will trade on the basis of economic equality at all times in the knowledge of the weight which carries in economic matters."
The EU really does have some very dodgy antecedents.
What a pity the Dr. Rath publication was either not available or unknown to me at the time.
I sweated blood on that translation!
Nick Drew
I couldn't believe my ears listening to Radio Tirana on SW. The jokes were the best.... Translated from English to Albanian , scored and adjusted for ideological rectitude and the translated back to English by three different people using (broke?) dictionaries
The end result was akin to a malfunctioning speech recognition system coupled to one of those bluidy smart kitchen table computer "oracles" from Amazon or Google...
Alexei Sayle built his early career in part on this.
It's the Kenny Ball version for me every time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SD6qQWxMrM
I first started watching RT when they regularly had Farage on to talk about the EU's latest lunacy and the BBC (plus to be fair the rest of the MSM broadcasting media here) were either ostracising him or on the few occasions he was interviewed were (trying) to set him up to demonstrate his "racism, bigotry, xenophobia, isolationism" blah blah blah.
Since then I've watched fairly regularly. It's always good to get the other guy's point of view. Then you can make an informed judgement yourself. Of course, our "liberal" masters don't want people making their own, informed, judgements so RT has to be vilified by its British equivalent.
You come across a big, big story online and later, when you tune in to the BBC's main news broadcast, there's hole where it should have been. That's when I change over to RT. Bias by omission: it's still propaganda when they don't report it. Like they didn't report on the 'refugee' who raped and murdered the teenage daughter of a high ranking EU official last year. Sky and ITV are no different.
I'm old enough to remember a time when the openness of this media meant reporters were constantly vying with each other for the grittiest of gritty stories. What you see now has been filtered to death and all the taste has gone. Add in political correctness and the MSM is just anodyne nonsense. The BBC's coverage of the Syrian war was absolutely hopeless. Don't get me started on Yemen.
Steve
The old Radio Moscow broadcasts which I listened to on my short-wave set whilst in the Merchant Navy were truly classic. I mean, whatever possessed the people who ran the damn news sections to broadcast such treasures as 'The Kiev Proletariat congratulates the collectives on utillising the new tractors given them through the solidarity of the Russian peoples.'
The best joke I ever heard about that truly absurd station was when an announcer broke in to a scheduled news broadcast by saying, 'Our champion runner, Ivan Ivanovich, has shattered several records. He smashed the 100 yards, the 400 yards sprint, the mile, the ten miles, and the marathon times in the past day' His tone then changed whilst stating,'All his efforts were in vain; he was captured and brought back to Moscow!'
The personal column in the old Pravda was good too.
" Comrade with knife and fork would like to meet comrade with steak and kidney pie"
Edward - or,
"Woman collective farmer 43 with 2 children, dog and tractor seeks similar man for marriage"
Response - "Please send photo of tractor"
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